Despite the horror, we survivors were endowed with a will to survive. Or instinct. Or maybe it was faith.

For a moment, she thought it natural in a way seeing a plane fall from the sky can seem natural, too. The horror comes later.

[M]y mother read a horror novel every night. She had read every one in the library. When birthdays and Christmas would come, I would consider buying her a new one, the latest Dean R. Koontz or Stephen King or whatever, but I couldn't. I didn't want to encourage her. I couldn't touch my father's cigarettes, couldn't look at the Pall Mall cartons in the pantry. I was the sort of child who couldn't even watch commercials for horror movies - the ad for Magic, the movie where marionette kills people. sent me into a six-month nightmare frenzy. So I couldn't look at her books, would turn them over so their covers wouldn't show, the raised lettering and splotches of blood - especially the V.C. Andrews oeuvre, those turgid pictures of those terrible kids, standing so still, all lit in blue.

If you cannot reach a state of utter oneness with each other, how do you expect to solve anything? Separate the world will crumble; together the world will thrive.

Totally present in this moment for you.

You have to appreciate where you have come from to know who you are in the present and whom you would like to be in the future.