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Flying with Death was like being in a sleeping bag with a sensuous woman and a tarantula.
Very few people know how to leave a moment like that alone and not fuck it up.
College girls terrify me! he appealed to his older, wiser self, a self he was getting to know and depend on. His wiser self was no help with the college girls. The voices were afraid of them, too.
We can apply reason, but what we can’t do is apply the storms and variations that govern a human mind moment to moment.”
People have to have something to live for besides just staying alive; that’s what animals do.
Most people were smart, if you gave them time and peace of mind. If you gave them a world where people weren’t terrified all the time, or angry.
It wasn’t easy. That was the first thing about learning anything worthwhile; you had to have patience. You had to know that if you tried to do a thing a thousand times, you could usually succeed in doing it, and if you practiced that thing a million times, you could do it very well. And so on. Mastering a thing was not magic, just hard work.
Sometimes superheroes are regular people, and there are millions of them, typing away at their keyboards.
It’s a slippery slope once we start saying what people should or shouldn’t see. It’s a real evil, a thing with substance and power.
Most people had a kind of unhappiness they carried around with them. You saw it in their eyes or heard it in the way they talked. They were always a little bit mad about something, or worried, or sorry. This nagging unhappiness was a way of living that most people had gotten used to.
“Breathing is our most intimate contact with the world outside ourselves.
“Don’t search the ends of the Earth looking for your happiness. Perfection is being happy with what you are right now.”
“I doubt very much,” he said, “that many happy people are assholes.”
All good parents taught their kids this same lesson: If everyone agreed to suffer pain or death rather than be treated unjustly, greedy people could never again gain power.
