When the tears were gone I washed my face and walked back to the store to finish my shopping. Because even when your heart is breaking you still need bread and Rice Krispies and orange juice.

It’s odd to suddenly discover you’re happy right in the middle of a moment. Usually, you don’t recognize happiness until it’s over and you’re looking back on it.

Adventures are only interesting once you've lived to see the end of them. Before that, they are nothing but fear, and being too cold or too hot or too wet or too hungry, and getting hurt.

It was only high school after all, definitely one of the most bizarre periods in a person’s life. How anyone can come through that time well adjusted on any level is an absolute miracle.

I have no language to paint the horrors of our situation. To shed tears was indeed altogether unavailing and withal unmanly yet I was not able to deny myself the relief they served to afford me.

Yet a part of you still believes you can fight and survive no matter what your mind knows. It's not so strange. Where there's still life, there's still hope. What happens is up to God.

Survival was more than the preservation of life. It was tenacity in the face of ruin, an unbroken resolve in the midst of defeat, a glimmer of hope in the maelstrom, and peace despite the wreckage.

Do you know the best way to get your body heat back?" Ethan asked her as he looked her in the eyes and stroked her glossy brown hair. “The way to warm up is to lie next to another person. Naked.

The master says it’s a glorious thing to die for the Faith and Dad says it’s a glorious thing to die for Ireland and I wonder if there’s anyone in the world who would like us to live.

I’m a survivor. And like the moon, I have a feeling it would take a truly spectacular event to keep me from taking my place in the scheme of things, waxing, waning, and eclipsing notwithstanding.

Your fear ain’t nothin but gum on the bottom of your shoe. The residue from some past experience is all it is. You can scrape the gum off or it can serve as a reminder of your testimony of survival.

Surviving is a basic thing. Getting by. Staying alive in whatever way we can. It doesn't mean we make right choices or drive fine cars or have good jobs. It means we found a way not to die. I survived.

I suspect it may be like the difference between a drinker and an alcoholic; the one merely reads books, the other needs books to make it through the day."(Interview with The Booklovers blog, September 2010)

Here is the world. It is not a safe place, but however frightening and bewildering life may become, we can survive our fears, grab them by the wolf ’s tail as Peter did, and make peace with the world.

This is life...Not a peace treaty, not an idealistic dream, but a grim dance of death and survival. The strong live on while the weak--the ones too small or too foolish to fight back--die in agony and blood.