“There's no way for them to take away my sadness, but they can make sure I am not empty of all the other feelings.”

“Giving to other people makes me feel alive. Not my car or my house. Not what I look like in the mirror. When I give my time, when I can make someone smile after they were feeling sad…”

“I can't make people change, and I can't change myself. I can't change the political climate, or fix the myriad problems of the world, or make anyone else happy. When I think about these things, I feel impotent and sad. When I don't think about them, I am running away from the truth. Either way I lose.”

“You can take my money from me; you can take my watch away; you can stripe me off my clothes; you may even can kill me. And yet, there is only a thing you will not be able to take away from me, no matter how hard you try: the fear I am feeling.”

“There are moments when I wish I could roll back the clock and take all the sadness away, but I have the feeling that if I did, the joy would be gone as well.”

“Inside my empty bottle I was constructing a lighthouse while all others were making ships.”

“I think because I felt so sad I had to bring out my feelings, and try to create music that would make me and all my friends feel better.”

“For me, living means I can be responsive to the other person. It means I can show my emotions and my feelings. Talk to them. Feel with them …”

“Once there had been joy, but now there was only sadness, and it was not, he knew, alone the sadness of an empty house; it was the sadness of all else, the sadness of the Earth, the sadness of the failures and the empty triumphs.”

“I wondered if it was possible to take someone's pain away with a kiss. Because that was what i wanted to do, take all of his sadness and pour it out of him, comfort him, make the boy i knew come back.”