Even in the most uneventful of our lives, we are called upon to choose our battles...

To love. To be loved. To never forget your own insignificance. To never get used to the unspeakable violence and the vulgar disparity of life around you. To seek joy in the saddest places. To pursue beauty to its lair. To never simplify what is complicated or complicate what is simple. To respect strength, never power. Above all, to watch. To try and understand. To never look away. And never, never to forget.

Enemies can't break your spirit, only friends can.

Who can know from the word goodbye what kind of parting is in store for us.

It is after all so easy to shatter a story. To break a chain of thought. To ruin a fragment of a dream being carried around carefully like a piece of porcelain. To let it be, to travel with it, as Velutha did, is much the harder thing to do.

The only dream worth having, I told her, is to dream that you will live while you're alive and die only when you're dead.