I never look back, darling! It distracts from the now.

- Edna Mode, The Incredibles

My mother told me that fear was not an option. I was always told that women are stronger, so I believed it.
- Diane von Furstenberg

Somewhere, in the sea of people
and along side the asphalt rivers,
just below the canopy of steal giants
is a break in the concrete where one single fragile flower grows.
Your struggle is stunning
and your bravery is beautiful.
I hope you choose to grow
in places no one ever
thought possible.
- r.m. broderick

Fate whispers to the man "You cannot withstand the storm" and the man whispers back - "I am the storm."
- 556 Productions

There are two basic motivating forces: fear and love. When we are afraid, we pull back from life. When we are in love, we open to all that life has to offer with passion, excitement, and acceptance. We need to learn to love ourselves first, in all our glory and our imperfections. If we cannot love ourselves, we cannot fully open to our ability to love others or our potential to create. Evolution and all hopes for a better world rest in the fearlessness and open-hearted vision of people who embrace life.
- John Lennon

Facing it — always facing it — that’s the way to get through.
- Joseph Conrad

They say the best blaze burns brightest, when the circumstances are at their worst.
- Sophie, Howl's Moving Castle

Just because everything's changing
Doesn't mean it's never been this way before
All you can do is try to know who your friends are
As you head off to the war
Pick a star on the dark horizon and follow the light
You'll come back when it's over
No need to say goodbye

- Regina Spektor, The Call

If you’re reading this, if there’s air in your lungs on this November day, then there is still hope for you. Your story is still going. And maybe some things are true for all of us. Perhaps we all relate to pain. Perhaps we all relate to fear and loss and questions. And perhaps we all deserve to be honest, all deserve whatever help we need. Our stories are all so many things: Heavy and light. Beautiful and difficult. Hopeful and uncertain. But our stories aren’t finished yet. There is still time, for things to heal and change and grow. There is still time to be surprised. We are still going, you and I. We are stories still going.
- Jamie Tworkowski

So often we try to make other people feel better by minimizing their pain, by telling them that it will get better (which it will) or that there are worse things in the world (which there are). But that’s not what I actually needed. What I actually needed was for someone to tell me that it hurt because it mattered.
I have found this very useful to think about over the years, and I find that it is a lot easier and more bearable to be sad when you aren’t constantly berating yourself for being sad.
- John Green

Fighting has taught me not to give up, even if everything inside of me is telling me that I am not good enough. It’s taught me that when I hear that voice, to treat it like any other liar. Ignore it.
- Lauren Sugihara-Daniels

I marvel at how even the wrong choices can keep us on the right path. How the worst mistake can wind up being the best thing that ever happened to us.
- Katie Klein

You can feel fire in the night
Lying here
Baby its like we're
Walking on a wire through the fear
Take my hand
We'll get there
- Mat Kearney

When I say it's you I like, I'm talking about that part of you that knows that life is far more than anything you can ever see or hear or touch. That deep part of you that allows you to stand for those things without which humankind cannot survive. Love that conquers hate, peace that rises triumphant over war, and justice that proves more powerful than greed.
- Fred Rogers, The World According to Mister Rogers

in celebration of surviving

when senselessness has pounded you around on the ropes
and you’re getting too old to hold out for the future
no work and running out of money,
and then you make a try after something that you know you won’t get
and this long shot comes through on the stretch
in a photo finish of your heart’s trepidation
then for a while
even the chill factor of these prairie winters puts it at fifty below
you’re warm and have that old feeling
of being a comer, though belated
in the crazy game of live

standing in the winter night
emptying the garbage and looking at the stars
you realize although the odds are fantastically against you
when that single January shooting star
flung its wad in the maw of night
it was yours
and though the years are edged with crime and squalor
that second wind, or twenty-third
is coming strong
and for a time
perhaps a very short time
one lives as though in a golden envelope of light
- Chuck Miller

I would rather be ashes than dust
I would rather that my spark should burn out
In a brilliant blaze than it should be stifled by dry-rot
I would rather be a superb meteor, every atom
Of me in magnificent glow, than a sleepy and permanent planet.
The function of man is to live, not to exist.
I shall not waste my days trying to prolong them.
I shall use my time.
- Jack London

Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.
- G.K. Chesterton

You cannot find peace by avoiding life.
- Virginia Woolf