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To look up at the nighttime sky is to become a part of a long line of people throughout human history who looked above at that same set of stars. It is to witness time unfolding.
Bravery is being unafraid of something other people are afraid of. Courage is being afraid, but strong enough to do it anyway.”
Because the world had decided that to be soft was to be weak, even though in Joan’s experience being soft and flexible was always more durable than being hard and brittle. Admitting you were afraid always took more guts than pretending you weren’t. Being willing to make a mistake got you further than never trying. The world had decided that to be fallible was weak. But we are all fallible. The strong ones are the ones who accept it.
Bravery, Joan suspected, is almost always a lie. Courage is all we have.
“The trees need our breath, and our breath needs the trees,” she continued. “As scientists we call that symbiosis, and it is a consequence of evolution. But the natural consequences of our connections to each other—that’s God, to me. I believe in it because I can see it with my own eyes. I know it exists. But I also believe in it because I want to believe in it. I want to spend my energy thinking not of how my actions might be frowned upon by a man in the sky, but how my actions affect every living and non-living thing around me. Life is God.
My life is tied to yours,
and to everyone’s on this planet. How does that not instantly make us more in debt to one another? And also offer us t...
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“Happiness is so hard to come by. I don’t understand why anyone would begrudge anyone else for managing to find some of it.”
She wanted what they had. She wanted what Donna and Hank had. And what every marriage in the whole godforsaken country had. The right to exist and to love and be proud and happy.
How entirely undemanding of yourself it was to believe that everything happened to you. And everything was about you. And that your feelings were the only ones that mattered. Worse yet, to afford yourself the role of the victim always—regardless of how grotesquely it required you to twist reality—so that you never had to look in the mirror and admit you were the perpetrator.
