His words coursed through him like jolts of electricity, some striking on target precisely because they were so unpredictable, causing him to shudder, and concede, and agree that literature was more than just jotting down stories, it was physical energy.

Life was more literary than literature.

If alphabet picture books contained a letter called happiness, their touch would be the illustration.

"When I look at the sky, I never cease to be amazed by the limitlessness of the universe," Evgeny Petrovich says. "Nowhere else except beneath this beauty can you sense how enormously insignificant you are. And when you acknowledge the billions of probabilities, you can't possibly believe that we are alone. Of course, somewhere out there someone is watching us. And if the stars are capable of surveillance, then that means that we're also allowed to watch."

That they seem terrifying and omnipresent is all the product of our paranoia. If we stop fearing them, they'll stop being fearsome.