My only wish is that we leave room for hope. There is good and bad in all things. We find what we expect to find. We see what we expect to see. I have learned that if I tilt my head just right and squint, the world outside is beautiful. The future is bright. There are good things to come.

Run, we think, as buildings crumble. Run, as people perish.

My life is too tight, he wanted to say. My skin is too tight. The walls are too tight.

"What we control," Juliette said, "is our actions once fate puts us there."

We are not the people who made this world, Lukas, but it's up to us to survive it. You need to understand that." "We can't control where we are right now," he mumbled, "just what we do going forward.

He thought of men like Hitler, Stalin, and Napoleon. All it took was a lot of seemingly decent people to put the wrong person in power and then fall under their spell.

We devolve into animals when we creep near to death.