PICTURE US IN THE LIGHT
by Kelly Joy Gilbert
“It’s nice to have someone in your life you don’t have to worry about as much, someone you know will always be okay.”
“You’re going to have to choose, too. You have to look at the world like- you got one shot in it, and at the end you’re going to have to look back and see whether you said all you needed to say and gave it back to the world to hear, or if you just let that shrivel up inside you to die with you. All of us have to make that choice.”
“Something happened, though, inside him; it was like all the color bled out from the world around him and what was left over was muted and dull.”
“It’s a profoundly lonely feeling when someone who’s supposed to love you doesn’t have it in them to be around you.”
“If history has shown anything, it’s that humanity is rotten at its very core. There is a screaming emptiness where goodness might reside; instead of empathy and principle there is fear and greed and stunning, breathtaking hypocrisy. People will believe themselves good in the face of all evidence to the contrary; people will smile and cling to their own respectability in the face of atrocity.”
“But when you light a fire you don’t always get to choose where it burns.”
“Other people don’t exist just to be your happy ending, you know?”
“Pain multiplies exponentially. What you cannot fix you can continue to destroy.”
“Who are you in the face of someone else’s pain?”