Oh, Criminal Minds. I love you for your suspense, your never-ending storyline, but, most surprisingly, your opening and closing quotes. Since I started watching the show, my Twitter is honestly just a maze of inspirational, thought-provoking opening and closing quotes from agents of the Behavioral Analysis Unit, usually said as the screen pans to a huge jet flying over a city. In eleven seasons, I have come to love a few, and these are my favorites:
1. "No man really knows about other human beings. The best he can do is to suppose that they are like himself." -John Steinbeck
(Season 11, Episode 21)
2. "Find the place inside where there's joy, and the joy will burn out the pain." -Joseph Campbell
(Season 7, Episode 8)
3. "There is a sacredness in tears. They are not the mark of weakness, but of power. They are messengers of overwhelming grief and unspeakable love." -Washington Irving
(Season 5, Episode 11)
4. "Although the world is full of suffering, it is also full of overcoming it." -Helen Keller
(Season 2, Episode 5)
5. "Forgiveness does not change the past, but it does enlarge the future." -Paul Boese
(Season 9, Episode 13)
6. "Try again, fail again. Fail better." -Samuel Beckett
(Season 1, Episode 1)
7. "So much of what is best in us is bound up in our love of family, that it remains the measure of our stability because it measures our sense of loyalty." -Haniel Long
(Season 5, Episode 9)
8. “Just because everything's different doesn’t mean anything has changed.” Irene Peter
(Season 10, Episode 1)
9. "It is more important to know what sort of person has a disease that to know what sort of disease a person has." -Hippocrates
(Season 9, Episode 18)
10. "There is no footprint too small to leave an imprint on this world." -Unknown
(Season 9, Episode 16)
11. "When you look long into an abyss, the abyss looks into you." -Friedrich Nietzsche
(Season 9, Episode 14)
12. "God sometimes takes us into troubled waters, not to drown us, but to cleanse us." -Unknown
(Season 12, Episode 8)
13. "No man chooses evil because it is evil he only mistakes it for happiness, the good he seeks." -Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
(Season 6, Episode 16)