How High We Go in the Dark

I saw a civilization that could destroy itself before it even reached the nearest star.

People have forgotten how to care for each other, for themselves. We can’t expect them to care about the world if they don’t care about what’s in front of them,

Opportunities are like little seeds floating in the wind. Your life is there. Some people have a big net to collect them all. Other people need to pray that the right seeds, the best ones, make their way to them with just enough bad ones to appreciate the good.

sometimes people and places serve a purpose for a finite amount of time to help you think and grow and love and then you move on.

I've always been proud of how much my daughter cared about the world. After school she’d study the news, comb the internet for disasters, wars and hate and injustice, write it all down in these color-coded journals. Once, I asked her what she was doing, and she said she was just trying to keep track of it all because it didn’t seem like anybody else noticed or cared that we kept making the same mistakes, that hate in a neighborhood or injustice in a state ran like poison through veins, until another ice shelf collapsed or another animal went extinct. Everything is connected, she’d say. And I’d tell her, You’re only one person and you only have one life.

My engineer father once told me that marriage and who you fall in love with are largely a matter of chance, chemicals, and how far you’re willing to drive.

what is laughter but a moment of release where pain and memory are washed away? When we laugh, we are stronger. When we laugh, we heal the world.

Hope, love, ingenuity. Possibility is more than what runs through our veins, little one.

I was never one to connect. I've been that way my entire life. I went to work, kept my head down, and came home. I let old friendships fizzle. I orbited my family and all of you like a distant planet - there and yet nearly impossible to reach.

She would have declared that the postapocalypse doesn’t mean we stop dancing.

Embrace possibility, but don't let it drag you down

I became an artist because I was terrible with people.

I hated questions where people pegged your entire identity on a few words.

You see, this is partly why Earth hasn’t received any messages from other worlds. Most have perished by the time their light reaches our sky. Sometimes hundreds of light-years exist between even the simplest forms of life.

She always preferred celestial objects to people.

And what happens to us when we leave our world? Children were trained to answer, 'we become everything that we pass until we become the thing we created.

It is difficult to comprehend just how far you’ve come, and I wonder if, apart from our tiny blue planet, we have much in common at all anymore.

It’s easy to be lost in fear. It brings people together, often for the wrong reasons.

In the real world, people comfort themselves with ignorance, politics, and faith

Sometimes it's hard to keep the facts straight after so long, to remember all that has happened (though the emotions remain like stains).

People like to forget about the sadness of the city,” Yoshiko responds. “They walk and walk. No one stops. It’s like we’re all still infected. We choose to be blind to each other’s suffering. It might make things easier to bear, but our hearts are cold.

He wonders what proportion of happy moments to sad ones is necessary for a person to sincerely want to keep living and hopes he and Yoshiko can get there together.

And remember,” the voice said, “what is laughter but a moment of release where pain and memory are washed away? When we laugh, we are stronger. When we laugh, we heal the world.

Kind of like ignoring history. You can try, but it'll probably bite you in the ass later.

You told me sometimes people and places serve a purpose for a finite amount of time to help you think and grow and love and then you move on.

Everyone scoffed when the governor first announced plans for an amusement park that could gently end children’s pain—roller coasters capable of lulling their passengers into unconsciousness before stopping their hearts.

It’s hard to ignore the Earth when it slowly destabilizes beneath you as you sleep, when it unlocks secrets you never asked for or wanted. On my first night, I stood outside and listened. And maybe it was my imagination, but I could have sworn I heard the soil churning, the dance of a million dead insects, early humans, and wolves.

Make a wish,' I say. And I wonder what goes through his mind, knowing that whatever he wished for will never come true. Maybe he knows this, too.