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“There’s no normal anymore,” said Harp. “There’s never going to be a normal again. So now’s probably as good a time as any to start acting like you’re the hero of your own story.”
Dear Universe, I say. Make me less meek, make me less afraid. Dear Universe, make me the hero of my own story.
The way we pick and choose whose lives are important—who we actually treat as human. There is nobody on this earth whose life is not of value.
I don’t want you to write off the rest of your lives, just because someone else’s God didn’t try to save you. Because you know what? The fact that he didn’t means he’s a bad God.”
The sun has just set and the clouds are a deep, aching blue. It looks like what I used to imagine heaven looked like, when I was a child and my parents had explained the concept. Even then, they subscribed to the idea of heaven, but from their description it seemed to me to be nothing more than a peaceful cloud palace populated by all my dead fish.
“What?” “It’s just, that came dangerously close to a statement of belief. Which, if I recall your claim correctly, I’ve apparently been trying to get out of you for two months.” “Peter,” I say, very seriously, “I finally trust you enough to tell you: I believe in the sky.”
That if I was put on this earth for any particular reason, it was to experience love and joy, just like anybody else.
It’s that people just like to tell themselves stories about where they came from. They can’t help themselves. They don’t trust the world around them—it’s too good for them, or not good enough—so they tell themselves stories about it. They tell themselves an old magician who lives in the sky made them out of clay and put them here until whenever he makes up his mind to take them out again.
It doesn’t actually matter where we came from, or where we’re going, or when. The only thing that matters is what we have to do while we’re here and how well we do it.”
“Vivian Apple. This is not the time for dramatics, okay? I get it: you’re tired, you’re lost, your heart’s broken. Well, suck it up. Because you’re my best friend, and I love you, but we’re not going to die in the woods together, okay? Not today. So stand up, goddamnit!”
“What the Church wanted from you wasn’t goodness; it was meekness. And I know because I’ve been meek for seventeen years. That’s what you just called godliness. It’s so much easier to be meek—to read the guidelines and submit and obey, instead of actually dealing with chaos, or pain—but it’s not what good is.
“The point is that we’re alive, Vivian Apple. And brave, and good. If we can make things even the tiniest bit better, we should do it now, while we have the chance.”
“If we’re going to survive it, we have to feel it. Even when we think it’ll wreck us. We’ll lean on each other. You won’t let it wreck me and I won’t let it wreck you. I’ll be right here, and I’ll pull you out of it when you need to be pulled out. Okay?”
