Love Is the Higher Law

There's no way for them to take away my sadness, but they can make sure I am not empty of all the other feelings.

I had no idea what I wanted, only that I wanted something, which is the worst kind of wanting.

I want to have faith in strangers. I want to have faith in what we're all going to do next. But I'm worried. I see things shifting from United We Stand to God Bless America. I don't believe in God Bless America. I don't believe a higher power is standing beside us and guiding us. I don't believe we're being singled out. I believe much more in United We Stand. I have my doubts, but I want it to be true. Wouldn't it be wonderful if we really came together, if we really found a common humanity? The hitch is that you can't find a common humanity just because you have a common enemy. You have to find a common humanity because you believe that's true.

Here's what breaks us: Even though we know better, we still want everything to be all right.

If you start the day reading the obituaries, you live your day a little differently.

We love and we feel and we try and we hope.

The secret to living long is to have something to live for.

The terrorists-those nineteen people, with hundreds or maybe thousands behind them-did the worst thing you can possibly imagine. But tens of millions people did the right thing...On 9/11, all the hatred and murder could not compare with the weight of love, of bravery, of caring.

Breathing is hard. When you cry so much, it makes you realize that breathing is hard.

Life goes on is a redundancy. Life is defined by its going on.

How amazing it is that friendships can become so full that you can't imagine what your life was like before them.

If goodness can't come from bad things, it makes bad things unbearable.

I don’t want to know anything, and I want to know it all

I guess it's a choice we make," she said. "What's a choice?" I asked. And she said, "How much of the world we let in.

This is what a memorial is: standing still, staring at something that isn’t ther

Gone is not forgotten, but our lives cannot be a memorial. This city cannot be a memorial. This city has to be a city. Our lives have to be our lives.

But I think we were walking around like we were invincible. And maybe that's a bad way to live your life. Because you're not invincible. Nobody is. And maybe now that we've learned that, we'll be better.

It was like everyone suddenly knew what mattered. Money didn't matter. Politics didn't matter. Tabloid news didn't matter. No-compassion mattered. Calm mattered. Respect mattered. Did it really take something of this magnitude to make us realize this?

It will affect me in ways I can't even begin to get my mind around. This day is a dark crater. There is no room for songs. The songs are wrong. Every song is wrong. And I don't know what to do without music.

This, I think, is how people survive: Even when horrible things have been done to us, we can still find gratitude in one another.

I think that if you were somehow able to measure the weight of human kindness, it would have weighed more on 9/11 than it ever had. On 9/11, all the hatred and murder could not compare with the weight of love, of bravery, of caring. I have to believe that.

Maybe there's a way to keep us in this moment. Not the sad part. But the coming together part.

This isn't even something I've feared, because I never knew it was a possibility.

Even though I'm seventeen, I guess I still thought this would always be true - that there would always be that lost-and-found, and not the lost-and-still-lost that I am now trapped inside.

We just want to walk. Our legs need to move to keep our minds from collapsing.

This is what a memorial is: Standing still, staring at something that isn't there.

That air. The air afterwards. I wanted to breathe it in. It felt right to breathe it in. Because we were breathing them in, weren't we? And the building. We were breathing it all in. And I thought, there's a part of this that's actually a part of me now. I now have that responsibility. I am alive, and I am breathing, and I can do the things this dust can't do.

In Sliding Doors, the whole idea is that every choice you make, and every single thing that happens to you changes the trajectory of your life, and once you are put on that trajectory, there is no way back. But Groundhog Day - which, I tell him, also happens to be a much better movie - says the opposite. It says if you mess up or make the wrong choice, you just have to keep at it until you do it right.

I had a sense then of how if we truly understood how many of the unimportant things we do will end up outliving us, we'd never be able to go on.