“Among other things, you’ll find that you’re not the first person who was ever confused and frightened and ever sickened by human behavior. You’re by no means alone on that score, you’ll be excited and stimulated to know. Many, many man have been just as troubled morally and spiritually as you are right now.”

“I was just guessing at numbers and figures, pulling the puzzles apart. Questions of science, science and progress, do not speak as loud as my heart.”

“When you try your best but you don’t succeed, when you get what you want but not what you need, when you feel so tired but you can’t sleep… stuck in reverse.”

“All my life, I realized, I’d only seen my parents one way, as if it was the only way they could be. One weak, one strong. One scared, one bold. I was beginning to understand, that that there were no such things as absolutes, not in life or in people. Like Owen said, it was day by day, if not moment by moment. All you could do was take on as much weight as you can bear. And if you’re lucky there’s someone close enough by to shoulder the rest.”

“I guess we are who we are for a lot of reasons. And maybe we’ll never know most of them. But even if we don’t have the power to choose where we go from there. We can still do things. And we can try to feel okay about them.”

“Life was like a box of chocolates. You never know what you’re gonna get.”

“I fell in love the way you fall asleep: slowly, then all at once.”

“You don’t get to choose if you get hurt in this world but you do have some say in who hurts you.”

“There will come a time when all of us are dead. All of us. There will come a time when there are no human beings remaining to remember that anyone every existed or that our species ever did anything. There will be no one left to remember Aristotle or Cleopatra, let alone you. Everything that we did and built and wrote and thought and discovered will be forgotten and all of this will have been for naught. Maybe that time is coming soon and maybe it is billions of years away, but even if we survive the collapse of our sun, we will not survive forever. There was time before organism experienced consciousness, and there will be time after. And if the inevitability of human oblivion worries you, I encourage you to ignore it.”

“Music is a total constant. That’s why we have such a strong visceral connection to it, you know? Because a song can take you back instantly to a moment, or a place, or even a person. No matter what else has changed in your or the world, that one song says the same, just like that moment.” 

“The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars.” 

“I’m not afraid of storms, for I am learning to sail my ship.”

“Some things don’t last forever, but some things do. Like a good song, or a good book, or a good memory you can take out and unfold in your darkest times, pressing down on the corners and peering in close, hoping you still recognize the person you see there.”

“In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart.”