Being brave and self-confident doesn't necessarily start inside...It starts with the rest of the world, and it leads back to you.

We'd start slow, the way we always did, because the run, and the game, could go on for a while. Maybe even forever. That was the thing. You just never knew. Forever was so many different things. It was always changing, it was what everything was really all about. It was twenty minutes, or a hundred years, or just this instant, or any instant I wished would last and last. But there was only one truth about forever that really mattered, and that was this: it was happening. Right then, as I ran with Wes into that bright sun, and every moment afterwards. Look, there. Now. Now. Now.

I'd come here planning to leave as soon as I could. It was a pit stop, not a destination. I had my whole life mapped out." "So what happened?" "I guess that map didn't turn out to be mine after all.

Of course it hurts", she grumbled, tipping my head further back. "Life sucks. Get over it

Because the truth sometimes hurts," I said. Yeah," he said. "So do lies, though.

Sure, there was no guarantee any of these things would actually happen as he envisioned. But maybe that wasn‟t the point.It was the planning that counted, whether it ever came to fruition or not.

Sitting there with them, it was almost hard to remember when I first came to Perkins, so determined to remember to be a one-woman operation to the end. But that was the thing about taking help and giving it, or so I was learning; there was no such thing as really getting even. Instead, this connection, once opened, remained ongoing over time.