She’d always chosen not to be victimized, to resist and fight back, to hold on to hope and dignity and faith in the future. But victimhood was seductive, a release from the responsibility and caring: Fear would be transmuted into weary resignation; failure would no longer generate guilt but, instead, would spawn a comforting self-pity.
He didn’t mind killing children. He looked forward to it.
May the judgment not be too heavy upon us.
True love meant being willing to live for the woman who was the other chamber of your heart, to work yourself threadbare for her if necessary, to know her mind as you knew your own, to love her as you loved yourself, to cherish her above all earthly things unto the end of your years. There was the valiant and exhilarating life, more thrilling than ten thousand expeditions up ten thousand Amazons!
She’s crazier than a syphilitic suicide bomber with mad-cow disease.
Criminals are as absurd as they are evil.
Teach us to care and not to care. Teach us to sit still.
Eventually, the storm blew itself out, because it is in the character of these strange times that any outrage, regardless of its unprecedented dimensions and horror, is inevitably followed by another outrage more novel and more shocking still.
In this troubled world, everything was transient except what we could carry with us in our minds and hearts. Every home ceased to be a home sooner or later, but not with its demolition. It survived destruction as long as just one person who had loved it still lived. Home was the story of what happened there, not the story of where it happened.
Even when acceptance is achieved and a degree of happiness attained, joy often remains elusive forever, like a promise of water in a dry well once brimming but now holding only the deep, damp smell of past sustenance. Yet.
There was a special exhilaration in the murder of the very young. He licked his lips.
Until they move on from this world, even the dead can know fear. You would think they have nothing to lose, but sometimes they are wretched with anxiety, not about what might lie Beyond, but about those whom they have left behind.
Judge Sheila Draper-Cruxton.
You’re probably just like my dad. You have this kind of pride. Honor, he called it. But these days, honor is for suckers, and that makes you angry.
You could withdraw, remake your life with a small circle of friends who didn’t wish to silence and punish their fellow countrymen with whom they disagreed, who knew the grievous threat to peace that arose from contempt for others, from an inflated self-esteem that became vainglory. But there was no town remote enough, no fortress walls high enough to protect you from mad ideas with mass appeal.
Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear – not absence of fear. – Mark Twain.
Is there some meaning to this life? What purpose lies behind the strife? Whence do we come, where are we bound? These cold questions echo and resound Through each day, each lonely night. We long to find the splendid light That will cast a revelatory beam Upon the meaning of the human dream. – The Book of Counted Sorrows.
They were good at enduring: adversity was the touchstone by which they proved their value to themselves.
Beware actors who can be anyone they wish to be; they are in fact no one at all, cold and empty, though they can be pied pipers to the masses.
But sometimes I knew things with my heart that my mind could not explain.