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Regardless, you can't be afraid to come across as weird if you want to make a difference. Every milestone of civilisation was first seen as the crazy idea of some subculture or another, from the Pythagorean theorem to the conviction that slavery is depraved.

Join a cult (or start your own)

"We are here, not because we are law-breakers; we are here in our efforts to become law-makers."
- Emmeline Pankhurst, suffragette (1858-1928)

In some circles, you'd think the highest good is not to have any impact at all. A good life is then primarily defined by what you don't do. Don't fly. Don't eat meat. Don't have kids. Reduce! Reduce! Reduce! The aim is to have the smallest foot-print possible, with your little vegetable garden and your tin house. Best-case scenario? Your impact on the planet is so negligible,you could just as well not have existed

Reminds me of that employee who said, "The best minds of my generation un ing about how to make people click ads."

I met one of these once.
How flipping depressing .

Maybe you dream of doing something else with your limited time on this planet. [...]
In that case, you'll need a book that's more than the latest guide to finding happiness. Not a book that makes life easier, but one that makes life a little harder. The kind of book you half-wish you'd never picked up at all because once you put it down, you might just have to change your life.
This is that kind of book.

“Choose a good, imperfect person who leaves the cap off the toothpaste, and puts the toilet paper roll on upside down, and loads the dishwasher like a ferret on steroids—and then appreciate the hell out of that person. Train yourself to see their best, most delightful, most charming qualities. Focus on everything they’re getting right. Be grateful—all the time—and laugh the rest off.”

We don’t get to know the whole story all at once. And where we’re headed matters so much less than how we get there.

Was this a happy ending?
Of course. And also only a beginning. In the way that beginnings and endings are always kind of the same thing.

If you wait for other people to light you up, then I guess you’re at the mercy of darkness.

“Yeah. I’m a pessimist, though, so I didn’t trust myself, either. I always start with death in every situation and work my way backward.”
“Are you starting with death now?” I asked.
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because you’re here. And you’re gonna be fine. And if you’re gonna be fine, then I’m gonna be fine. So it’s not even a question.”
“That’s the worst logic I’ve ever heard.”

My first read in french!!

Laura
It has happened
Here we go

Every hour, she thinks, someone for whom the war was memory falls out of the world.
We rise again in the grass. In the flowers. In songs.

Flowers grow on her tiny wrought-iron balcony, and in summer she can estimate what time of day it is by feeling how wide the petals of the evening primroses have opened.

"When I lost my sight, Werner, people said I was brave. When my father left, people said I was brave. But it is not bravery; I have no choice. I wake up and live my life. Don't you do the same?"
He says, "Not in years. But today. Today maybe I did."

He is a ghost. He is from some other world. He is Papa, Madame Manec, Etienne; he is everyone who has left her finally coming back.

'Chapter 159: The Simultaneity of Instants' was gut-wrenching in its entirety. Unfortunately I can't paste here the whole thing for future me, but I will safeguard the final lines and their goosebumps:

[...] Werner hears Marie-Laure inhale, Marie-Laure hears Werner scrape three fingernails across the wood, a sound not unlike the sounds of a record coursing beneath the surface of a needle.
He says, "Es-tu là?"

All your life you wait, and then it finally comes, and are you ready?

Stick-thin, alabaster-pale Etienne LeBlanc runs down the rue de Dinan with Madame Ruelle, the baker's wife, on his heels: the least-robust rescue ever assembled.

You are alive.
I am only alive because I have not yet died.

A line comes back to Marie-Laure from Jules Verne: "Science, my lad, is made up of mistakes, but they are mistakes which it is useful to make, because they lead little by little to the truth".

"Ready?" He sounds like her father when he was about to say something silly. In her memory, Marie-Laure hears the two policemen: "People have been arrested for less." And Madame Manec: "Don't you want to be alive before you die?"

Deep in Madame's voice, Marie-Laure hears water: atolls and archipelagoes and lagoons and fjords.
Etienne proves to be a tender nurse. Washcloths, broth, now and then a page from Pasteur or Rousseau. His manner forgiving her all transgressions past and present. He wraps Madame in quilts, but eventually she shivers so deeply, so profoundly, that he takes the big heavy rug off the floor and lays it on top of her.

They just say words, and what are words but sounds these men shape out of breath, weightless vapors they send into the air of the kitchen to dissipate and die.

"Don't you want to be alive before you die?"

"It's not a person you wish to fight, Madame, it's a system. How do you fight a system?"
"You try."

Into the stillness come the voices of his masters, echoing from one side of his head while memory speaks from the other.
Open your eyes and see what you can with them before they close forever

"Your problem, Werner," says Frederick, "is that you still believe you own your life."

No one stops him. No shells come whistling in. Sometimes the eye of a hurricane is the safest place to be.

[...] There is pride, too, though, pride that he has done it alone. That his daughter is so curious, so resilient. There is the humility of being a father to someone so powerful, as if he were only a narrow conduit for another, greater thing. That's how it feels right now, he thinks, kneeling beside her, rinsing her hair: as though his love for his daughter will outstrip the limits of his body.