No my friend, darkness is not everywhere, for here and there I find faces illuminated from within; paper lanterns among the dark trees.

Darkness does not leave us easily as we would hope.

Even in the darkest of times, there is ALWAYS hope. For without darkness, there cannot be light!

I still have my lantern.

If the whole world is evil, then the tragedy that befell you is justified," she went on. "That would make it easier for you to accept the deaths of your wife and daughters. But if good people do exist, then, however much you deny it, your life will be unbearable; because fate set a trap for you, and you know you didn't deserve it. It isn't the light you want to recover, it's the certainty that there is only darkness.

Once I knew the depth where no hope was, and darkness lay on the face of all things... But a little word from the fingers of another fell into my hand that clutched at emptiness, and my heart leaped to the rapture of living.