Heroes were ordinary people who knew that even if their own lives were impossibly knotted, they could untangle someone else’s. And maybe that one act could lead someone to rescue you right back.
The answer is that there is no good answer. So as parents, as doctors, as judges, and as a society, we fumble through and make decisions that allow us to sleep at night – because morals are more important than ethics, and love is more important than law.
When you want something bad, you’ll tell yourself a thousand lies.
I have always envied people who believe strongly in religion, people who could face a tragedy by praying and know that it would be all right. As unscientific as it seems, well, it would be nice to lay the responsibilities and pain on someone else’s larger shoulders.
But as he grew older, he learned that a word was a powerful thing. An insult didn’t have to be shouted to bleed; a vow didn’t have to be whispered to make you believe. Hold a thought in your head, and that was enough to change the actions of anyone and anything that crossed your path.
Maybe that’s what we do to the people we love: we take shots in the dark and realize too late we’ve wounded the people we are trying to protect.
If you had grown up with me, this is one of the things I would have tried to teach you: Marry a man who loves you more than you love him. Because I have both now, and when it is the other way around, there is no spell in the world that can even out the balance.
Love is not an equation... It is not a contract, and it’s not a happy ending. It is the slate under the chalk and the ground buildings rise from and the oxygen in the air.
The night is falling down around us. Meteors rain like fireworks, quick rips in the seam of the dark... Every second, another streak of silver glows: parentheses, exclamation points, commas – a whole grammar made of light, for words too hard to speak.
Change isn’t always for the worst; the shell that forms around a piece of sand looks to some people like an irritation., and to others, like a pearl.
I can’t do this to you,′ he said, drawing back. Emily put her hand on his and pulled the gun to her temple. ‘Then do it for me,’ she said.
You have everything,” she said slowly, as if she were explaining the order of the world to a small child. “A family, a great job, a lot of people who look up to you. You’ve got a place to go home to.” She smiled a little. “So go.
There are legions of us, I realized. The mothers who have broken babies, and spend the rest of our lives wondering if we should have spared them. And the mothers who have let their broken babies go, who look at our children and see instead the faces of the ones they never met.
Nobody, who looks at a shard of flint lying beneath a rock ledge, or who finds a splintered log by the side of the road would ever find magic in their solitude. But in the right circumstances, if you bring them together, you can start a fire that consumes the world.
You can always edit a bad page. You can’t edit a blank page.
There’s a cliff at the end point of a person’s life; most us of peer over the edge of it, hanging on. That’s why, when someone chooses to let go, it’s so dramatically visible. The body will seem almost transparent. The eys will be looking at something the rest of us can’t see.
Somewhere along the line, organized religion stopped being about faith, and started being about who had the power to keep the faith. You said that the purpose of religion was to bring people together. But does it, really? Or does it-knowingly, purposefully, and intentionally – break them apart?
When you love someone, you don’t see parts of him you don’t like.
I have no idea what Andrew might have done, and I do not ask. She believes that I can fix this, and like always, that’s enough to make me think that I can. “I’ll take care of it,: I say, when what I really mean is: I’ll take care of you.
You don’t make a friend,” Jacob said with a scowl. “It’s not like they come with directions like you’d find on a box of macaroni and cheese.