Maddie

“So the goal, I think, is to stay kind for as long as you can, no matter what happens to you. No matter what you go through, no matter how many breaks you get and how many you don’t. And I think you always have to remember that if someone is mean to you, they are like that with everybody else too. You see, Bela? Meanness doesn’t have to spread. It can stop with the mean person, stop at the threshold of the kind person. I guess I’d put it this way: don’t let them in. Don’t invite them in. If there’s one thing I could convey to you, one thing that would take root in you just like the need to eat and sleep, it would be this: try to stay kind as long as you can. For all of your life. Always be mindful of what others are enduring. And whatever you do, most of all, don’t allow someone else’s meanness, someone else’s cruelty, to get inside of you.”
― Josh Malerman, Incidents Around the House

“Because he has done the good thing, the right thing, and only then become the victim of its vanishing, this virtuous man may now turn with the full support of any onlooker to violence, rage, nihilism, and debauchery.”
― CJ Leede

“If you think about it, every time you’ve ever been scared in your life so far, you’ve also survived whatever you were scared of. Right? You’ve literally gotten through everything you thought you might not. Everything you thought you weren’t strong enough to get through…you got through it. Or else you wouldn’t be here to know you got through it. Right?”
― Josh Malerman, Incidents Around the House

“...the trick of getting through this life with your sanity, is deciding to let the right feelings exist inside your house and your heart. Some people let in a lot of dark feelings and some people don't let any dark feelings in at all, but that's a lot of work and I think it's best to let in a good healthy mix of both. Still, the feelings to look out for are the ones that are immovable, the ones made of stone... there are people who would take the feeling you have now and make a statue of it, so that in their house there is always this solid, unremovable statue that remains long into old age.... because I know that the longer a statue remains, the harder it is to take out of the house.”
― Josh Malerman