“You know. Life's short. If you don't try new things, you'll never know what you're best at. And you can only make time for new things by quitting the things you know don't work for you.”
“But I guess you would look beatific, too, if the man you had been in love with since the fifth grade had told you that he was in love with you, too.”
“The fact that he was willing to sacrifice his own face in order to keep mine from getting bashed in”
“I was in love with Scott Bennett. That I had been in love with him my whole life, practically.”
“We kissed all the way through the fireworks display. We didn’t even notice that there was a fireworks display… …I guess because we’d been making fireworks of our own.”
“Because my heat was too full of appreciation for what my friends-- my real friends-- had done for me.”
“She'd realize Steve was her soul mate and that she would never love anyone as much as she loved him.”
“I thought if you wore that, no matter what face you saw every morning in the mirror," he said in his deep voice, "you'll never forget who you really are."
My eyes filling with tear, I held my hand out across the tabletop. He grasped my fingers, his grip strong and reassuring.
"As if I ever could," I said, my voice clogged with emotion, "with you around to remind me.”
“What's wrong?"
"Nothing," I said. Because nothing was wrong. For the first time in my entire life, it seemed, everything was suddenly, fantastically right.”
“You know. Life’s short. If you don’t try new things, you’ll never know what you’re best at. And you can only make time for new things by quitting the things you know don’t work for you.”
“He strengthened his body to keep up with his mind. He began lifting weights, practicing judo, and wrestling. One day after school, a bully tried to pick on Carmack’s neighbor, only to become a victim of Carmack’s judo skills.”
“She knew it was weird that she'd reached out to him the way she had. But she also knew that there were a lot of people in the world who regretted never doing the things they felt were right because they were afraid of seeming strange or crazy. Lisa wouldn't settle for that sort of mediocre existence, one bound by invisible social cues. And she had a good feeling that someone like Solomon Reed would appreciate that.”
“A child is the quickest to trust because they have no concept of the depravity of our species.”
“The poison that is war does not free us from the ethics of responsibility. There are times when we must take this poison - just as a person with cancer accepts chemotherapy to live. We can not succumb to despair. Force is and I suspect always will be part of the human condition. There are times when the force wielded by one immoral faction must be countered by a faction that, while never moral, is perhaps less immoral.
We in the industrialized world bear responsibility for the world’s genocides because we had the power to intervene and did not. We stood by and watched the slaughter in Chechnya, Sri Lanka, Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Rwanda where a million people died. The blood for the victims of Srebrenica- a designated UN safe area in Bosnia- is on our hands. The generation before mine watched, with much the same passivity, the genocides of Germany, Poland, Hungary, Greece, and the Ukraine. These slaughters were, as in, Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s book Chronical of a Death Foretold, often announced in advance”
“Our planet Earth has a diameter of 0.04 light-seconds. Neptune’s orbit spans 8 light-hours. The stars of the Milky Way galaxy delineate a broad, flat disk about 100,000 light-years across. And the Virgo supercluster of galaxies, to which the Milky Way belongs, extends some 60 million light-years.”
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