“the mind is a tyrant”

“One of the hardest tasks as a human being is knowing when to keep an open mind, and when not to.”

“The most insane things can become normal if you have them around you long enough. A mind can’t seem to hold anything too crazy for too long without finding a way to make it seem normal.”

“It was possible, maybe, to have facts in your mind that weren't facts at all. You could build a whole life's story on false assumptions. You could make truths out of untruths and untruths out of truths. Until you spoke them, really said them out loud or checked for sure, you may not have known which were which.”

“Just that, is one of those uncommon moments, those times when you don't wish for something else, for even one thing to be different; when you have no other needs or worries, where your insides are calm, and everything you were ever restless about, anything that had ever given you angst, is quieted to stillness. No steel ball in your chest, no breathless fear. No blue numbness of nearly passing out, no nagging doubts of the backstage mind. All of that, forgotten. It is just rightness, so rare.”

“Sometimes you build up these walls, you build and you build and you build up these walls and you think they’re so strong, but then someone can come along and tip them over with only his fingers, or the weight of his breath.”

“Maybe we all just want to feel special, even for a little while, to be fooled for a bit into feeling something besides the truth of our own ordinariness.”