Welcome to Night Vale is a podcast that is released bi-weekly in the style of a fictional radio broadcast. The creators, Joseph Fink and Cranor, have been publishing these podcasts since 2012. Cecil Gershwin Palmer, the radio host, gives updates on the desert community of Night Vale. These updates include traffic, the weather, announcements from the Sheriff’s Secret Police, reminders not to go in the dog park, and cultural events. It is kind of like a town where all your uncle’s conspiracy theories have come true.

Welcome to Night Vale was forced on me a little bit during high school when my Tumblr feed was overcome with it, but I never listened to it. It did not find its way back into my life until I was a sophomore in college. I had been diagnosed with a neurological disorder that caused me a great deal of pain. This pain made sleeping hard, and I was also told to start listening to calming music. Welcome to Night Vale truly became something that helped me cope. When the pain forced me to stay in bed but left sleep elusive, it transported me to a different world-- a world filled with suffering, five-headed dragons trying to kill the mayor, and glow clouds, but another world nonetheless.

There are a lot of wonderful things about Welcome to Night Vale, like the openly gay narrator, racially ambiguous characters, and producers that care about their listeners, but here are the best quotes from the series so far.

1. "We understand so much, but the sky behind those lights-- mostly void, partially stars-- that sky reminds us we don't understand even more."

2. "I like my coffee like I like my nights: dark, endless, and impossible to sleep through."

3. "Believe in yourself. You are an ancient, absent god, discussed only rarely by literary scholars. So if you don't believe, no one will."

4. "Today you will meet a beautiful stranger. Actually hundreds of beautiful strangers. Everyone is beautiful and you know almost none of them."

5. "Kill it with kindness, and if that doesn't work, kill it with sharp sticks and knives."

6. "Be proud of your place in the Cosmos. It is small and yet it is."

7. "Perfection. It isn’t real. It isn’t human, and Carlos is not perfect.

No–even better–he is imperfect. Everything about him, and us, and all of this is… it’s imperfect. And those imperfections in our reality are the seams and the cracks into which our outsized love can seep and pool. And sometimes we’re annoyed. And disappointed. And that too is a part of how love works. It’s not a perfect system, but… oh well."

8. "Death is only the end if you assume the story is about you."

9. "Your existence is not impossible, but it's also not very likely."

10. "There is a thin semantic line separating weird and beautiful, and that line is covered in jellyfish."

11. "If it looks like a duck, and it quacks like a duck, you should not be so quick to jump to conclusions."

12. "We did not crumble, we did not back down. We stood eye to eye with violence, and it blinked first."

13. "Confused? At a loss for what to do? Wow, sounds like you're human. Good Luck."