Reese

“To fall in love with the world isn’t to ignore or overlook suffering, both human or otherwise. For me anyway, to fall in love with the world is to look up at the night sky and feel your mind swim before the beauty and the distance of the stars. It is to hold your children while they cry and watch the sycamore trees leaf out in June. When my breastbone starts to hurt, and my throat tightens and tears well in my eyes, I want to look away from feeling. I want to deflect with irony or anything else that will keep me from feeling directly. We all know how loving ends. But I want to fall in love with the world anyway, to let it crack me open. I want to feel what there is to feel while I am here.”
― John Green, The Anthropocene Reviewed: Essays on a Human-Centered Planet

“If you never saw the stars, candles were enough.”
― Maggie Stiefvater, The Dream Thieves

“This is the nature of time — it dilates during suffering and also during joy, rushes through our fingers into the sea when we seek to hold it tight; when we are depressed, the hours open up indefinitely as we are condemned to endure yet another day of consciousness, and then, and then, we look up and realize that we have lost weeks, months, even years to the sticky-fingered destroyer of joy, never to be regained.”
― Veronica Schanoes, Burning Girls and Other Stories

“You're asking me to define an abstract concept that no one has managed to explain since time began. You sort of sprang it on me," Gansey said. "Why do we breathe air? Because we love air? Because we don't want to suffocate. Why do we eat? Because we don't want to starve. How do I know I love her? Because I can sleep after I talk to her. Why?”
― Maggie Stiefvater, The Raven King