Quote

When things begin to go bad, the perception of people makes it worse.

It's essential to distinguish between events that are really beyond your control and events you caused yourself.

When you have a traumatic event in your life, you change. You're not the same person you were, and you have to discover who you've become.

When you do bad things, bad things happen to you.

When you put your characters in a dire situation, they often do things that surprise even you, so you have to go back and revise your original conception of who they are.

Anyone can identify with those moments in life where circumstances or people inform us that we've strayed from the path of our better nature and intentions. We know what that's like, and we resist it - so as not to feel like we're bad people.

Bad things do happen; how I respond to them defines my character and the quality of my life. I can choose to sit in perpetual sadness, immobilized by the gravity of my loss, or I can choose to rise from the pain and treasure the most precious gift I have - life itself.

It's not what happens to you, but how you react to it that matters.

Things present themselves to you, and it's how you choose to deal with them that reveals who you are. We all say a lot of things, don't we, about who we are and how we think. But in the end it's your actions, how you respond to circumstance that reveals your character.