Not everyone has to be the Chosen One. Not everyone has to be the guy who saves the world. Most people just have to live their lives the best they can, doing the things that are great for them, having great friends, trying to make their lives better, loving people properly. All the while knowing that the world makes no sense but trying to find a way to be happy anyway.
I was born into all that, all that mess, the over-crowded swamp and the over-crowded sematary and the not-crowded-enough town, so I don’t remember nothing, don’t remember a world without Noise. My pa died of sickness before I was born and then my ma died, of course, no surprises there. Ben and Cillian took me in, raised me. Ben says my ma was the last of the women but everyone says that about everyone’s ma. Ben may not be lying, he believes it’s true, but who knows?
The great trick of the devil is to make you want to see him. But it is only when you see him that you fear him. And by then, it is too late.
Blame is something that is shared and denied in equal measures.
No todos en la vida somos buenos o malos, casi todos estamos en un punto medio.
Belief is half of all healing. Belief in the cure, belief in the future that awaits. And here was a man who lived on belief, but who sacrificed it at the first challenge, right when he needed it most. He believed selfishly and fearfully.
People break, I guess. Everyone.
The Field isn’t really much of a field, it’s more like a property plot that someone never built on because they died or lost it in a divorce or something...
And if no one sees you, are you really there at all?
No one wanted to hear that people other than themselves might be complicated, that no one was ever just one thing, no history ever just one version.
I began to feel that itch that every writer longs for: the itch to start getting words down, the itch to tell a story.
It does not matter what you think, your mind will contradict itself a hundred times each day. Your mind will believe comforting lies while also knowing the painful truths that make those lies necessary. You do not write your life with words, you write it with actions. What you think is not important. It is only important what you do.
But wherever I am, whatever this world is, I’ve just got to be sure I’m me and that’s what’s real... Know yourself and go in swinging. If it hurts when you hit it, it might be real, too.
We stay watching the fire, which probably is just a fire, but we watch it together. Me and my friends. And there’ll be a tomorrow, of course there will, when it all begins again, but right now is almost a kind of loop for me, something to feel on the inside of, but this time it’s good. It’s a loop with my friends that would even be a pretty damn good forever.
What happens to you when you get older? Do you just forget everything from before you turned eighteen? Do you make yourself forget?
And he also knew he was going to get through it. It would be terrible. It would be beyond terrible. But he’d survive.
They want us a bit dumb and a bit afraid. Which for the most part, I think we are.
You’re a good boy. I wish you didn’t have to be quite so good.
When they were together like that, they had been their own private universe, bounded just by themselves, a population of two. They were the world, and the world was them.
I wonder if realizing you’re not sure about stuff is what makes you a grown up?