The three hardest tasks in the world are neither physical feats nor intellectual achievements, but moral acts: to return love for hate, to include the excluded, and to say, ‘I was wrong’

— Sydney J. Harris

Love is not putting your partner’s satisfaction before your own safety. Love is not jealousy dressed as protection…We are taught to swallow our own protest in exchange for his apology…When my friends asked why I stayed so long–why I accepted the roses and ignored the thorns–I tell them it is not easy to weed out the roots he planted in me. I tell them I was so captivated by the house he built for me. I didn’t notice the locked door. I didn’t know I was captive to this garden of guilt.

— Exes, Jessica Romoff & Mila Cuda

One of the risks of being quiet is that the other people can fill your silence with their own interpretation: You’re bored. You’re depressed. You’re shy. You’re stuck up. You’re judgmental. When others can’t read us, they write their own story—not always one we choose or that’s true to who we are.

But in a war between individuality and conformity,
the individual is always outgunned. The conformists have machines on their side. They think they’ve got
all the angles covered. But they forgot two important things: crazy people–we don’t play by the rules–and there are always side effects.

— in The Scribbler (2014)