The dead pull the living down.
In any random slaughter, the difference between living and dying rarely has anything to do with willpower, or wisdom, or pluck. It's just a matter of where you're standing. Two inches to the right, and the bus hits you. If your office is on the ninety-second floor instead of the ninetieth, you don't make it out in time.
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In any random slaughter, the difference between living and dying rarely has anything to do with willpower, or wisdom, or pluck. It's just a matter of where you're standing. Two inches to the right, and the bus hits you. If your office is on the ninety-second floor instead of the ninetieth, you don't make it out in time.
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Terror is the desire to save your own ass, but horror is rooted in sympathy.
Horror was rooted in sympathy . . . in understanding what it would be like to suffer the worst.
Are you what is called a lucky man? Well, you are sad every day. Each day has its great grief or its little care. Yesterday you were trembling for the health of one who is dear to you, today you fear for your own; tomorrow it will be an anxiety about money, the next day the slanders of a calumniator, the day after the misfortune of a friend; then the weather, then something broken or lost, then a pleasure for which you are reproached by your conscience or your vertebral column; another time, the course of public affairs. Not to mention heartaches. And so on. One cloud is dissipated, another gathers. Hardly one day in a hundred of unbroken joy and sunshine. And you are of that small number who are lucky! As for other men, stagnant night is upon them.
It must be nice to be so strong and to think it's because you're so good, that you live right and eat right, so you deserve your health and happiness. But there is such a thing as luck, and there's more bad luck than good in this world.
Happiness, you see, its just an illusion of Fate, a heavenly sleight of hand designed to make you believe in fairy tales. But there's no happily ever after. You'll only find happy endings in books. Some books.