" Books never cease to astonish me. When I was a child, I knew -- in the incontestable way that children know things -- that God was an author who'd imagined me, which is why I (and everyone else) existed: to populate His narrative. My task was to imagine God in return: this was all He and I owed each other.

Between people it is less clear what is owed. Yet perhaps what is love is really an empathetic and hungry imagination. One must be willing to enter other stories -- even terrifying or dangerous ones, or those of uncertain outcomes. "

― Martha Cooley , The Archivist