“It was like this blackness that crept into the corners of my life until everything was grey and dirty. My insides felt burnt out, like if you cut me open, all you would find would be smoke. No heart. No bones. There was nothing left, just the anger. It followed me everywhere. It sat on my bed and watched me sleep and when I had to eat, it looked at me across the table.”
“I don’t know if that’s ever happened to you, if you’ve loved someone, loved who they are, then found out they’re not that person after all. It doesn’t just break your heart, does it? It breaks you. Then you’re not who you thought you were, either.”
“We all know what we had, don’t we? We just never thought we could lose it.”
“All my life, all I'd ever heard was: Emily's so shy, Emily's so quiet, Emily's so clever. Thinking back on it now, I don't know if I was ever any of those things, or if I just became shy and quiet and clever because everyone said I was.”
“Why do you hate her, Emily?"
"For reminding me that I did this to myself.”
“China shop rules, Juliet: you break it, you pay for it, and you broke me. You got what you deserved.”
“Doctor Gilyard was right, Juliet and I do have a lot in common. She lost her mother, I lost my mother. She lost her father, I lost my father. She had to start again, I had to start again. She had to pretend to be someone else, I had to pretend to be someone else. But where she was better for it, I was worse. Where she used what happened to make her stronger, I held on to it. I let it distil into something filthy and black. And I hated her for that.
Hated her.”
“That fucking notebook. I’m going to set fire to it.”
“Hast du jemals so jemanden kennengelernt? jemanden,der so gut ist -nicht perfekt ,sondern gut -das man sich daneben wie Abfall fühlt”
“But there is one more reason to protect other species. One seldom if ever mentioned. Perhaps we are the first to talk and think and build and aspire, but we may not be the last. Others may follow us in this adventure. Some day we may be judged by just how well we served, when alone we were Earth’s caretakers.”
“The stars in their infinite peace seemed to pour their healing light into me. I thought of captives in prison, the sick and the suffering from the beginning of time who had looked to these stars for strength. What was my little sorrow to the centuries of pain which those stars had watched? So near they seemed, so compassionate. My bitter hurt seemed to grow small and drop away. If I must go on alone, I should still have silence and the high stars to walk with me.”
“Praying actualizes and deepens our communion with God. Our prayer can and should arise above all from our heart, from our needs, our hopes, our joys, our sufferings, from our shame over sin, and from our gratitude from the good. It can and should be a wholly personal prayer.”
“know.” She took a breath, and suddenly I liked her smile a great deal. “Maybe you are.”
“Solitude Is Not Separation SOME men have perhaps become hermits with the thought that sanctity could only be attained by escape from other men. But the only justification for a life of deliberate solitude is the conviction that it will help you to love not only God but also other men. If you go into the desert merely to get away from people you dislike, you will find neither peace nor solitude; you will only isolate yourself with a tribe of devils.”
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