Chasing Fireflies

by Charles Martin

“The only monster you need to worry about in this life is the one that stares at you from the mirror each morning. You tame him, make friends with him, and the rest of life is nothing you can’t handle.”

“If God can make a firefly’s butt light up like a star, then anything is possible. Anything.”

That’s life. You take the bad with the good. Rise up through it. Live in the midst of it. It’s the bad that lets you know how good the good really is. Don’t let the bad leave you thinking like there ain’t no good. There is, and lots of it, too.”

“Sometimes good judgment comes from experience, and a lotta that comes from bad judgment.”

“You can put your boots in the oven, but that doesn’t make them biscuits.”

Men spend their lives asking Who am I when the real question is Whose am I? I don’t think you can answer the first until you’ve settled the second. First horse, then cart. Identity does not grow out of action until it has taken root in belonging. The orchid speech taught me that.

“Inside you is a thing worth putting on a pedestal—worth putting out there for all the world to see. That piece of rock might have been knocked around, roughed up a bit, considered scrap, and thrown on the trash pile . . . but that’s only because they don’t know what’s on the inside. They can’t see like Michelangelo. ’Cause if they could, they’d know that there’s something in there that’s just waiting to jump out.

Like there is inside you. I’m sorry for the hammer and chisel. I wish life didn’t work that way.”

“Words that soak into your ears are whispered, not yelled.”

“He said he gave up what he couldn’t keep to gain what he couldn’t lose.”

Love does that. It names the nameless and gives voice to the voiceless.

know this about boys: we are all born with a dad-sized hole drilled in the center of our chest. Our dad’s either fill it with themselves, or as we grow into men and start to sense the emptiness, we medicate it with stuff. Usually addictions.