Is it any wonder the power this man held over me - this man who did not run from his demons like most of us do, but embraced them as his own, clutching them to his heart in a choke-hold grip. He did not try to escape them by denying them or drugging them or bargaining with them. He met them where they lived, in the secret place most of us keep hidden. Warthrop was Warthrop down to the marrow of his bones, for his demons defined him; they breathed the breath of life into him; and without them, he would go down, as most of us do, into the purgatorial fog of a life unrealized.

I am the one, Not Running, Not Staying, But FACING

That's what you do when the curtain is falling--you give the line that the audience wants to hear.

But monsters, I now know, come in all shapes and sizes, and only their appetite for human flesh defines them.

I don't care what the stars say about how small we are. One, even the smallest, weakest, most insignificant one, matters.

There are times when fear is not our enemy. There are times when fear is our truest, sometimes only, friend.

What boy my age didn’t dream of fleeing the well-tended lawn and lamp-lit street for the untamed wilderness, where grand adventure awaited on the other side of the horizon, where the stars burned undimmed in the velvet sky above his head and the virgin ground lay untrodden beneath his feet?