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When Calvin, Meg, and Mr. Murray make their desperate tesser from Camazotz to Ixchel, Mr. Murray tries to explain to Meg and Calvin the nature of the Dark Thing and IT. His thesis has an eerie resonance today, positing that a planet can become dark because of totalitarianism (and specific dictators are named on both sides of the political spectrum). But a planet can also become dark because of "too strong a desire for security... the greatest evil there is." Meg resists her father's analysis. What's wrong with wanting to be safe? Mr. Murray insists that "lust for security" forces false choices and a panicked search for safety and conformity. This reminded me that my grandmother would get very annoyed anyone would talk about "the power of live." Love, she insisted, is not power, which she considered always coercive. To love is to be vulnerable; and it is only in vulnerability and risk- not safety and security- that we overcome darkness.

— A Wrinkle in Time (Time Quintet, #1) by Madeleine L'Engle

I’m not the way I am because of what I dreamt and remembered about my aunt Helen. That’s what I figured out when things got quiet. And I think that’s very important to know. It made things feel clear and together. Don’t get me wrong. I know what happened was important. And I needed to remember it. But it’s like when my doctor told me the story of these two brothers whose dad was a bad alcoholic. One brother grew up to be a successful carpenter who never drank. The other brother ended up being a drinker as bad as his dad was. When they asked the first brother why he didn’t drink, he said that after he saw what it did to his father, he could never bring himself to even try it. When they asked the other brother, he said that he guessed he learned how to drink on his father’s knee. So, I guess we are who we are for a lot of reasons. And maybe we’ll never know most of them. But even if we don’t have the power to choose where we come from, we can still choose where we go from there. We can still do things. And we can try to feel okay about them.

I think that if I ever have kids, and they are upset, I won’t tell them that people are starving in China or anything like that because it wouldn’t change the fact that they were upset. And even if somebody else has it much worse, that doesn’t really change the fact that you have what you have. Good and bad. Just like what my sister said when I had been in the hospital for a while. She said that she was really worried about going to college, and considering what I was going through, she felt really dumb about it. But I don’t know why she would feel dumb. I’d be worried, too. And really, I don’t think I have it any better or worse than she does. I don’t know. It’s just different. Maybe it’s good to put things in perspective, but sometimes, I think that the only perspective is to really be there. Like Sam said. Because it’s okay to feel things. And be who you are about them.

— The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky (98%)

WING IT! THERE’S NOTHING LEFT. Remember the gold-ish chain? This is the other end of the rainbow. Talk yourself out of a situation you can’t talk your way out of. Make your own luck. Put on a show. If you fall, let them remember how you turned it into a dive. Sometimes the finest hour is the last one.

— Making Money by Terry Pratchett (77%)

'Do you trust them? Trust me.’

‘You use that phrase an awful lot, Mr Lipwig,’ said Hicks.

‘Well, I’m very trustworthy.'

— Making Money by Terry Pratchett (83%)

So, I decided to find another place to go and figure out why people go there. Unfortunately, there aren’t a lot of places like that. I don’t know how much longer I can keep going without a friend. I used to be able to do it very easily, but that was before I knew what having a friend was like. It’s much easier not to know things sometimes. And to have french fries with your mom be enough.

At first, I thought her blank expression was the result of surprise, but after it didn’t go away for a long while, I knew that it wasn’t. It suddenly dawned on me that if Michael were still around, Susan probably wouldn’t be “going out” with him anymore. Not because she’s a bad person or shallow or mean. But because things change. And friends leave. And life doesn’t stop for anybody.

— The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky (66%)

Where, exactly, was the law? Right now?

What did he think he was doing?

The Job, of course. The one that’s in front of you. He’d always done it. And the law had always been…out there, but somewhere close. He’d always been pretty sure where it was, and it definitely had something to do with the badge.

The badge was important. Yes. It was shield-shaped. For protection. He’d thought about that, in the long nights in the darkness. It protected him from The Beast, because the beast was waiting in the darkness of his head.

He’d killed werewolves with his bare hands. He’d been mad with terror at the time, but The Beast had been there inside, giving him strength…

Who knew what evil lurked in the hearts of men? A copper, that’s who. After ten years, you thought you’d seen it all, but the shadows always dished up more. You saw how close men lived to The Beast. You found that people like Carcer were not mad. They were incredibly sane. They were simply men without a shield. They’d looked at the world and realized that all the rules didn’t have to apply to them, not if they didn’t want them to. They weren’t fooled by all the little stories. They shook hands with The Beast.

But he, Sam Vimes, had stuck by the badge, except for that time when even that hadn’t been enough and he’d stuck by the bottle instead…

He felt as if he’d stuck by the bottle now. The world was spinning. Where was the law? There was the barricade. Who was it protecting from what? The city was run by a madman and his shadowy chums, so where was the law?

Coppers liked to say that people shouldn’t take the law into their own hands, and they thought they knew what they meant. But they were thinking about peaceful times, and men who went around to sort out a neighbor with a club because his dog had crapped once too often on their doorstep. But at times like these, who did the law belong to? If it shouldn’t be in the hands of the people, where the hell should it be? People who knew better? Then you got Winder and his pals, and how good was that?

What was supposed to happen next? Oh yes, he had a badge, but it wasn’t his, not really…and he’d got orders, and they were the wrong ones…and he’d got enemies, for all the wrong reasons…and maybe there was no future. It didn’t exist anymore. There was nothing real, no solid point on which to stand, just Sam Vimes where he had no right to be…

It was as if his body, trying to devote as many resources as possible to untangling the spinning thoughts, was drawing those resources from the rest of Vimes. His vision darkened. His knees felt weak.

There was nothing but bewildered despair.

And a lot of explosions.

— Night watch by Terry Pratchett (59%)

Vimes had mixed memories of Captain Tilden. He had been a military man before being given this job as a kind of pension, and that was a bad thing in a senior copper. It meant he looked to Authority for orders, and obeyed them, whereas Vimes found it better to look to Authority for orders and then filter those orders through a fine mesh of common sense, adding a generous scoop of creative misunderstanding and maybe even incipient deafness if circumstances demanded, because Authority rarely descended to street level. Tilden set too great a store by shiny breastplates and smartness on parade. You had to have some of that stuff, that was true enough. You couldn’t let people slob around. But although he’d never voice the view in public, Vimes liked to see a bit of battered armor around the place. It showed that someone had been battering it. Besides, when you were lurking in the shadows you didn’t want to gleam…

— Night watch by Terry Pratchett (16%)

There were plotters, there was no doubt about it. Some had been ordinary people who’d had enough. Some were young people with no money who objected to the fact that the world was run by old people who were rich. Some were in it to get girls. And some had been idiots as mad as Swing, with a view of the world just as rigid and unreal, who were on the side of what they called “The People.” Vimes had spent his life on the streets and had met decent men, and fools, and people who’d steal a penny from a blind beggar, and people who performed silent miracles or desperate crimes every day behind the grubby windows of little houses, but he’d never met The People.

People on the side of The People always ended up disappointed, in any case. They found that The People tended not to be grateful or appreciative or forward-thinking or obedient. The People tended to be small-minded and conservative and not very clever and were even distrustful of cleverness. And so, the children of the revolution were faced with the age-old problem: it wasn’t that you had the wrong kind of government, which was obvious, but that you had the wrong kind of people.

As soon as you saw people as things to be measured, they didn’t measure up.

What would run through the streets soon enough wouldn’t be a revolution or a riot. It’d be people who were frightened and panicking. It was what happened when all the machinery of a city faltered, the wheels stopped turning, and all the little rules broke down. And when that happened, humans were worse than sheep. Sheep just ran; they didn’t try to bite the sheep next to them.

— Night watch by Terry Pratchett