All We Have Left

People do terrible things. People do beautiful things. It’s against the black backdrop of evil that the shining light of good shows the brightest. We can’t just focus on the darkness of the night, or we’ll miss out on the stars.

… when something terrible happens, all we have left is choice. You can fill that awful void inside you with anger, or you can fill it with love for the ones who remain beside you, with hope for the future.

Faith and strength aren’t something you wear like some sort of costume; they come from inside you.

Friends are sometimes the only thing that keep us from plunging into the abyss. But you have to reach for them, and they have to be there on the side of the cliff reaching out to you too.

“The way I see it, teenage dating sucks,” she continues. “It never lasts, and then you break up, and you mope around writing crappy poetry and generally feeling awful about yourself. After a while you find another guy, and it starts all over again. Why is all that pain worth it if you know it’s not going to work out?”

My mom used to tell me when I was having one of my attacks that I needed to hold on for just one minute longer than I thought I could bear, and then one more. I think bravery is trusting yourself enough to know you can hold on for that one more minute.

Hate is just fear. Fear that we are powerless, ugly, small, nothing, so we hate people to make us feel better about ourselves, so we don’t have to be so scared all the time.

I kind of envy people with all that faith; it would make things so much easier.

Just because people do bad things in the name of religion doesn’t make the religion bad. People do crappy things, people do awesome things. That’s just people.

Smiling is good for the soul. Laughter is even better. Volcanoes feel so much better when they let it all out.

“Listening to what ignorant people say is like listening to a dog fart,” Tanjia says. “You ignore it and hope it’ll go away.”

Having a superhero for a friend doesn’t do anybody any good when that friend is only real on paper.