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There were two ways to be happy: improve your reality, or lower your expectations.
“I know how to take care of myself.” “What about letting someone else do it once in a while?”
But then again, maybe bad things happen because it’s the only way we can keep remembering what good is supposed to look like.
but all she could recall were a thousand ordinary moments. A thousand ordinary moments that some mothers would never get to have again with their own children.
She stood up carefully, because that is how it’s best to move in a world where you no longer fit.
As the world came into focus, Peter realized how people looked when they glanced at him. As if he were the punch line to a joke. And Peter, with his 20/20 vision, cast his eyes downward, so that he wouldn’t see.
If you spent your life concentrating on what everyone else thought of you, would you forget who you really were? What if the face you showed the world turned out to be a mask . . . with nothing beneath it?
It was a strange feeling to be scrutinized so carefully and to know all the same that no one would ever dare to tell her to her face that something was wrong.
if Peter had felt true pain, might he have been less likely to inflict it?
If you gave someone your heart and they died, did they take it with them? Did you spend the rest of forever with a hole inside you that couldn’t be filled?
But true character showed when you could find something to love in a child everyone else hated.
But when you inverted the equation—expectation divided by reality—you didn’t get the opposite of happiness. What you got, Lewis realized, was hope.
He started wondering if there were exceptions to the rule: if happy people might be hopeful, if the unhappy might have given up any anticipation that things might get better.
It took him several sheddings of his own adolescent skin to find a group of friends who let him be whoever he wanted;
he’d marveled at the mystery life must be for someone that young. Imagine a world that seemed so much bigger than you. Imagine waking up one morning and finding a piece of yourself you didn’t even know existed.
