Taken quotes

Most people change kind of slowly. They're who they are and then after a while, they're someone else. But some people know the exact moment where their lives changed. They saw the person they were going to marry or the look in their baby's eyes the first time he smiled. For some people, it's not the good things in life that made them change. It's something they've gone through that makes everything they look at from that moment on seem very different from how it had always been.

People are lonely in this world for lots of different reasons. Some people have something in their disposition. Maybe they were just born too mean, or maybe they were born too tender. But most people are brought to where they are by circumstance, by calamity or a broken heart or something else happening in their lives that wasn't anything they planned on. People are lonely in this world for lots of different reasons. The one thing that I do know is, it doesn't matter what any one of them might tell you--nobody wants to be alone.

Some people have given up all hope of anything in their lives every changing. They just go on with it day by day, and if something were to come along and make things different they probably wouldn't even notice it right off, except for that kind of nervous feeling you get in your stomach. My mom and I used to call that "the car trip feeling," because it was how I'd feel whenever I knew we were going to go somewhere far away or somewhere new.

When you're a kid, all you ever want is for the stories your mom reads you to be true. You think you can crawl inside the world that's in every book and live in the pictures on every page, but deep down you know that this isn't something that could ever happen. And it's knowing that the magic isn't quite there, that it's just over the next hill or maybe in the next story, that makes you feel safe in your bed at night. You really wouldn't want it to be any other way.

There are times when it seems like the whole world is afraid...when the fear is something you have to live with day in day out. When people get scared, they do a lot of different things. They fight, or they run, they destroy the thing they're afraid of, or they put a lot of distance between it and them...make it something you can shoot at with a friction-action gun.

Why do people want so desperately not to be alone? Why is it more comforting to think you are being watched than to know that no one at all is watching? And why, really, does that make us any less alone? In the end, if there are others out there, then wouldn't we be, all of us, still alone together?

People believe what they want to believe. They find meaning where they can, and they cling to it. In the end, it really doesn't matter what's a trick and what's true. What matters is that people believe.

People like to examine the things that frighten them, to look at them and give them names, so saints look for God, and scientists look for evidence. They're both just trying to take away the mystery, to take away the fear.

We all like to think that we have some control over the events in our lives, and a lot of the time we can fool ourselves into thinking that we really are in charge. But then something happens to remind us that the world runs by its own rules and not ours and that we're just along for the ride.

You know in cartoons, the way someone can run off a cliff and they're fine, they don't fall until they look down? My mom always said that was the secret of life. Never look down. But it's more than that. It's not just about not looking. It's about not ever realizing that you're in the middle of the air and you don't know how to fly.

The world is made up of the big things that happen and the small ones. And the part that's so unfair is that we call them "big" and "small", because when something happens to you, when you lose something or someone that you really care about, that's all there is. The world may be blowing up around you, but you don't care about that. You don't care about that at all.

I have this idea about why people do the terrible things they do. Same reason little kids push each other on the schoolyard. If you're the one doing the pushing, then you're not going to be the one who gets pushed. If you're the monster, then nothing will be waiting in the shadows to jump out at you. It's pretty simple, really. People do the terrible things they do because they're scared.

We're all standing on the edge of a cliff, all the time, every day, a cliff we're all going over. Our choice isn't about that. Our choice is about whether we want to go kicking and screaming or whether we might want to open our eyes and our hearts to what happens once we start to fall."

If a dream is just a dream, something that happens in your mind while you're asleep, then that's alright. It's yours to take with you into the morning, and it fades away there in the light. But when the dreams start to come while you're awake, and they come with the light, then that is not all right. What we look for then is other people who have dreamed what we've dreamed, who have seen what we've seen. When the dreams become real, sometimes the only comfort you can find is in knowing that you're not alone.

I think when you're older, what gets hard is that you forget how to take things as they come. And sometimes, the things that do come are more than anyone should have to take.