Here was where she had learned this skill all those years ago, where she had learned how good it felt to run away. - Hugh Howey

Happiness can come solely from within, but not for long - The Bern Seer -

Billy Pilgrim wasn't weak, she decided, as he drifted back to sleep — he was broken. The whole system was broken. Sending young men to war, expecting them to come back whole, their bullets to make things right. Expecting a girl from the Big Sky State to step off a bus in LA and have a career that wouldn't kill her. The machinery of it all was set up unfair from the start. Living in three dimensions meant you learned what you needed to know too late in life.

Cave bears hibernated for a season. Humans hibernated each night. Daytime was a shift, each one endured like a quantum of life, all the short-term planning leading up to another bout of darkness, little thought given to stringing those days into something useful, some chain of valuable pearls. Just another day to survive.