“I’ve had that look before. In fact, this is a perpetual look of mine: the telltale 'I don’t know if I really want to be here anymore' look.”

“I want you to go back into the barrack and tell the men to come out after the storm. Tell them to look up at me tied here. Tell them I’ll open my eyes and look back at them, and they’ll know that I survived.”

“I am who I am. There’s no changing that. No taking it away.”

“Change is ok, I guess. In small, infrequent, and easily chewable doses.”

“I like to consider myself to be an average individual. Of course, there’s probably a certain subset of the population that would disagree with this, but they can just go fuck themselves.”

“I should look like someone I would want to see.”

“Don’t be scared of making mistakes,” she said, waiting for me to look at her before continuing. “Be scared of making none. Because if you’re not making a healthy number of mistakes along the way, you’re not really living life to its fullest.”