Vigilant Corpse

“You'll Never Walk Alone' is cheesy but not wrong. The song doesn't claim that the world is just a happy place. It just asks us to walk on with hopes in our hearts. And like Louis in the Carousel, even if you don't really believe in the golden sky or the sweet silver song of the lark when you start singing, you believe it a little more when you finish.”
― John Green, The Anthropocene Reviewed: Essays on a Human-Centered Planet

“(And when you've been hurt once, you're afraid to try again later, in dread of enduring the same pain. You avoid getting hurt in an attempt to avoid suffering: for years, this principle will serve as my holy sacrament. So many lost years.)”
― Philippe Besson, Lie With Me

“It can sometimes feel like loving the beauty that surrounds us is somehow disrespectful to the many horrors that also surround us. But mostly, I think I’m just scared that if I show the world my belly, it will devour me. And so I wear the armor of cynicism, and hide behind the great walls of irony, and only glimpse beauty with my back turned to it, through the Claude glass. But I want to be earnest, even if it’s embarrassing. The photographer Alec Soth has said, “To me, the most beautiful thing is vulnerability.” I would go a step further and argue that you cannot see the beauty which is enough unless you make yourself vulnerable to it.”
― John Green, The Anthropocene Reviewed: Essays on a Human-Centered Planet

“Forgive me, for all the things I did but mostly for the ones that I did not.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History