“At every moment of our lives we all have one foot in a fairy tale and the other in the abyss.” ~ Paul Coelho, from Eleven Minutes

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Today is the birthday of author Paul Coelho (1947), Stephen Fry (1957) author, actor, and comedian, John Green (1977) author, and one of my favorite gingers, Rupert Grint (1988).

From John Green’s Looking for Alaska:

. . . we had to forgive to survive in the labyrinth. There were so many of us who would have to live with things done and things left undone that day. Things that did not go right, things that seemed okay at the time because we could not see the future. If only we could see the endless string of consequences that result from our smallest actions. But we can’t know better until knowing better is useless. . . .

Before I got here, I thought for a long time that the way out of the labyrinth was to pretend that it did not exist, to build a small, self-sufficient world in a back corner of the endless maze and to pretend that I was not lost but home. But that only led to a lonely life accompanied only by the last words of the already-dead, so I came here looking for a Great Perhaps . . .