Edith

“I need you to hug Wallace for me.”
Wallace spluttered.
“Wow,” Mei said. “I’m so glad I ran out here for this.” She tapped her fingers against her palm. A little light burst before fading as quickly as it’d come. “Any specific reason?”
“Because I can’t do it,” Hugo said. “And I want to.”
― T.J. Klune, Under the Whispering Door

“The paradox is that the ecosysytem as a whole needs its participants to ac with restraint in order to avoid collapse, but the participants themselves have no inbuilt mechanism to encourage such behavior.

Other than fear?

Other than fear, which is a feeling you want to avoid or stop at all costs”
― Becky Chambers, A Psalm for the Wild-Built

“And for a moment they were Jem-and-Will again. Will could see Jem, but also through him, to the past. Will remembered the two of them, running through the dark streets of London, jumping from rooftop to rooftop, seraph blades gleaming in their hands; hours in the training room, shoving each other into mud puddles, throwing snowballs at Jessamine from behind an ice fort in the courtyard, asleep like puppies on the rug in front of the fire.
Ave atque vale... Hail and farewell. He had never given much thought to the words before, he had never thought about why they were not just a farewell but also a greeting. Every meeting led to a parting, and so it would, as long as it was mortal. In every meeting there was some of the sorrow of parting, but in every parting there was some joy of the meeting as well.
He would not forget the joy.
...
"Wo men shi sheng si ji jiao," said Will, and he saw Jem's eyes widen, fractionally, and the spark of amusement inside them. "Go in peace, James Carstairs.”
― Cassandra Clare, Clockwork Princess

“Don’t cry because you think your best days are gone, smile because you had them in the first place.”
― Kelly Bishop, The Third Gilmore Girl: A Memoir