The only way to vanquish cowardice is to brandish courage.
I had been fortified by trauma, the way a bone, once broken, grows back stronger than it had been.
It was words and reading that had made me quiet, and being quiet had made me a mark.
One doesn’t have to operate with great malice to do great harm. The absence of empathy and understanding are sufficient. In fact, a man convinced of his virtue even in the midst of his vice is the worst kind of man.
A lie is like a cat: you need to stop it before it gets out the door or it’s really hard to catch.
I better understood the little lies that liquor told, lifting spirits and drowning sorrows while withholding the whole truth–that, in the end, it is the spirit in peril of drowning. Sorrows have gills.
We don’t vote for people because they are the exact embodiment of our values, but because they are likely to be the most responsive to them.
It was the kind of building that remembered things, deep-down things, things that rode tears into the world, telling them back to anyone old enough or wise enough to know how to listen with their eyes.
Trying hard and working hard is its own reward. It feeds the soul. It affirms your will and your power. And it radiates from you, lighting the way for all those who see you.
I don’t know how to describe the sound of a world crashing. Maybe there is no sound, just a great emptiness, an enveloping sorrow, a creeping nothingness that coils itself around you like a stiff wire.