susan murphy monsters vs aliens

“Okay, sweetie,” she agreed, leaning down to kiss me softly in my hair. “We won't tell him, not until and unless you're absolutely, one hundred percent sure you want him to know. And if you decide you never do, that's okay too. Whatever you want.”

Maybe you and I do deserve to suffer for our wrongdoing. If that’s so, then it means that when things get painful, when things get difficult, we don’t have the luxury of quitting. We don’t get to end our lives to escape what we did. Whatever form the pain takes, we bear it, we endure it, we welcome it, all while we try to make this world a place where people like us, like how we used to be, have no place, and the people who would be hurt can instead live in peace. The next time you encounter an obstacle you cannot overcome, when you just want to curl up into a ball and quit on the world, remind yourself that you don’t deserve the peace of surrender. You have to keep working, to keep fighting, to keep suffering, until the day when you’ve fully repented.

Everything seemed fine, but only for a moment. Valia felt something seize her mind, like a hand around her throat, forcing her to look at something she didn’t want to see. The stars she normally saw through her subconscious, those flickering lights, were brushed aside, and beyond them, new stars could be seen. However, they didn’t produce light, so much as bend the light around them, staining it with malevolent haze.