It Gets Better, a short film by Eli Guerron is a visual essay hoping to remind its audience that things can get better. It is about the hard times and it is about having the courage and endurance to push through them. It is about hope.

Everybody meet Caine.

Caine is a precious 9-year-old boy from East Los Angeles. Obsessed with all things arcade, he decided to build his own from cardboard box last summer in the store front of his dad’s used auto parts business.

(Source: Flickr / beverly13)

It’s like in the great stories, Mr. Frodo. The ones that really mattered. Full of darkness and danger, they were. And sometimes you didn’t want to know the end. Because how could the end be happy? How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad happened? But in the end, it’s only a passing thing, this shadow. Even the darkness must pass. A new day will come. And when the sun shines, it will shine out the clearer. Those were the stories that stayed with you, that meant something. Even if you were too small to understand why. But I think, Mr. Frodo, I do understand. I know now. Folk in those stories had lots of chances for turning back, only they didn’t. Because they were holding on to something.

—J.R.R. Tolkien, The Two Towers

I have said before that I do not know what the most important lesson is that I will ever teach my children, Cate and Emma Claire and Jack. I do know that when they are older and telling their own children about their grandmother, they will be able to say that she stood in the storm, and when the wind did not blow her way — and it surely has not — she adjusted her sails.

(Source: prettythingscleverwords)

A man of sense is never discouraged by difficulties; he redoubles his industry and diligence, he perseveres, and infallibly prevails at last.

— Lord Chesterfield

Huang Guofu lost his arms in an electrical accident at the age of four, but never became discouraged. Instead, he pursued his dreams by painting with his feet.