🐸

“I called it bonding, the establishment of a connection or trust between two people who have something in common. That something in common was me. It started as a glimmer of hope and then, a sure belief that this person could help me; a trust that they actually would.”

“Co-Piloting is a skill we all must learn. To lend confidence by our presence, to lend reassurance in times of concern, to be companions to those who need us; these are parts of life we need to nurture and hold precious.”

“Dreams begin when people say you can't. That's the time to climb into the cockpit. If you put every tear you shed feeling sorry for yourself into your fuel tank, you'll have enough power to keep flying forever.”

“"And I need to tell you out loud, Alice, that I can't explain it. I don't know why or how except for destiny and magic, but I love you in a way that feels like breathing, in a way that I cannot stop, even when I try."

“It's the not giving up that separates the winners from the losers.”

“You had to appreciate the small things in life when the big things made you want to curl up in the corner in the fetal position and give up.”

“Life could injure you, but you could get up again if you were strong enough, and especially if you had the right person to help you out.”

"Wild. That's how I describe it all. My love. My life. Alaska. Truthfully, it's all the same to me. Alaska doesn't attract many; most are too tame to handle life up here. But when she gets her hooks in you, she digs deep and holds on, and you become hers. Wild. A lover of cruel beauty and splendid isolation."

“You don't stop loving a person when they're hurt. You get stronger so they can lean on you.”

“It's funny how when you find someone you like as much as I liked her, the destination is suddenly wherever they are. Even if there's someplace better, you wouldn't go if they couldn't come.”

“The best kind of love doesn't happen on moonlit walks and romantic vacations. It happens in between the folds of everyday life. It's not grand gestures that show how you feel, it's all the little secret things you do to make her life better that you never tell her about. Taking the end piece of the bread at breakfast so she can have the last middle piece for her sandwich when you pack her lunch. Making sure her car always has gas so she never has to stop at the pump. Telling her you're not cold and to take your jacket when you are in fact, very, very cold. It's watching TV on a rainy Sunday while you're doing laundry and turning her light off when she's fallen asleep reading. Sharing pizza crusts and laughing about something the kids did and taking care of each other when you're sick. It isn't glamorous, it isn't all butterflies and stars in your eyes. It's real. This is the kind of love that forever is made of. Because if it's this good when life is draining and mundane and hard, think of how wonderful it will be when the love songs are playing and the moon is out.”

- Justin

“Not everything that comes out of crisis is bad. Sometimes your traumas are the reason you know how to help.”

“The human body is the greatest machine ever made, but it cannot run without the human spirit. We can live a few weeks without food, a few days without water, but without hope, without faith in other human beings? We will fail and break down. So that was how we survived. Through friendship, cooperation. Through hope.”

“I have a belief that if you have good morale, if you can hang onto hope, your body can do miraculous things. Tomorrow will come. When you're dead, you're dead, but where there is life, there is hope. Why not give hope a chance? It costs you nothing!”

“There are always miracles in the world, even when all seems hopeless. And when there are no miracles, you can make them happen. With a simple act of kindness, you can save another person from despair, and that might just save their life. And this is the greatest miracle of all.”

“It’s possible to forget how much pain you carry, how much hurt there is in your subconscious, until you are presented with evidence of everything you've lost.”

“Here is what I learned. Happiness does not fall from the sky; it is in your hands. Happiness comes from inside yourself and from the people you love. And if you are healthy and happy, you are a millionaire.”

“It does no good to hold onto anger. Anger leads to fear, which leads to hate, which leads to death.”

"You could decide to be happy," a friend told me once. She's a therapist, and we were walking in the woods near my house, stopping every now and then to call back to an owl who was hooting at us from the trees. "The rest of it? Put it in a little boat in your mind and just push it out to sea." "Are you telling me to repress my sorrow and anger?" I said, surprised, and she said, "Not repress. Set free."

“The power she had over me terrified me. But it also gave me clarity.

There is a peace in knowing the one thing you can't live without. It simplifies all things. There was her, and then there was everything and everyone else. And only she really mattered.”

“The Isabelle who came back from the concentration camp was not the woman who’d survived the bombings at Tours or crossed the Pyrenees. The Isabelle who came home was broken and sick. She was unsure of so many things, but not about what she'd done.

“On the day before she died, she sat in the shade beside me and held my hand and said, 'V, it's enough for me.'I said, 'What's enough?' and she said, 'My life. It's enough.’

"And it was. I know she saved some of the men in this room, but I know that you saved her, too. Isabelle Rossignol died both a hero and a woman in love. She couldn't have made a different choice. And all she wanted was to be remembered. So, I thank you all, for giving her life meaning, for bringing out the very best in her, and for remembering her all these years later."

-Vianne

“It’s a lot for anyone to realize that we go on, even when our hearts stop beating. That the pain of life still can follow us even through death. I don’t blame you for what happened. I don’t think anyone could. And you shouldn’t blame yourself. Learn from it. Grow from it, but don’t allow it to consume you again. Easier said than done, I know.”

“Remember what I told you about need versus want? We don’t need you because that implies you had to fix something in us. We were never broken. We want you, Wallace. Every piece. Every part. Because we’re family. Can you see the difference?”

“It’s rare that you love the person who loves you, that you love only the person who loves only you. Otherwise, somebody’s heartbroken.”

“But I guess that’s why true love is so alluring in the first place. It’s hard to find and hold on to, like all beautiful things. Like gold, saffron, or an aura borealis.”

“It was the kind of pain that existed because, once upon a time, so did she. And I carried that pain, and that love, and that terrible, terrible day, with me. I got comfortable with it. I walked with it.

Sometimes the people you love left you halfway through a story.

Sometimes they left you without goodbye.

And, sometimes, they stayed around in little ways. In the memory of a musical. In the smell of their perfume. In the sound of the rain, and the itch for adventure, and the yearning for that liminal space between one airport terminal and the next.

I hated her for leaving, and I loved her for staying as long as she could.

And I would never wish this pain on anyone.”

“I’d always written how grief was hollow. How it was a vast cavern of nothing.

But I was wrong.

Grief was the exact opposite. It was full and heavy and drowning because it wasn’t the absence of everything you lost- it was the culmination of it all, your love, your happiness, your bittersweets, wound tight like a knotted ball of yarn.”

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