Ben Payne

She used humor to ward off the pain. I'd seen other people do it. Usually something in their past had emotionally wounded them, and so they used humor or sarcasm to mask it. Take their mind off it.

Putting one foot in front of the other.

Sticks and stones may break my bones, but if you want to hurt someone... way down deep, use words.

I had to let her go. She's not coming back. The distance is too great. The mountain between us is the one mountain I cannot climb.

And every minute that passed would feel like an hour. Waiting for somebody does that. It turns minutes to hours, hours to days, and days to several lifetimes.

Once a heart breaks... it doesn’t just grow back. It’s not a lizard’s tail. It’s more like a huge stained glass that shattered into a million pieces, and it’s not going back together. Least not the way it was. You can mush it all into one piece, but that doesn’t make it a window. That makes it a pile of broken colored glass. Shattered hearts don’t mend and they don’t heal. They just don’t work that way.

Being lost with you is better than being found and alone.

This... living with a broken heart is living half dead, and that doesn’t mean you’re half alive. It means you’re half dead. And... that’s no way to live.

There is always a chance.

Like a word you say over and over until you're only hearing what it sounds like and you've forgotten what it means.

I have three addictions. Running. Mountains. And good hot coffee. And not necessarily in that order.

Laughter can heal the hurt places.

Darkness does that. It speaks fears that, left alone, remain unspoken, yet real.

Way down deep... like where the souls sleep and dreams happen, where pain can't live because there's nothing for it to feed on... then a wedding is a bleeding together of those two souls. Like two rivers running together. All that water becoming the same water.

It's amazing what we value when we're at our lowest.

One of the things I've learned both in medicine and climbing mountains is that you attack one crisis at a time.