No one can break as many rules as I have and not get caught somehow, sometime.
There are some things you only tell a sister. And some things you only ask of a sister.
You always have more to lose, until you die.
So much of life is in the smallness of life. So much of life is in the smallness of moments. But they are harder to mark. So we need the grander celebrations and occasions. People like to feel significant.
As we came out of the hallway, I pretended that the whole world had secret tunnels, where people could walk straight to wherever they really wanted to be and ignore all the meanness in the middle.
It was a little thing, a baby tree, but still it tangled with things around it and required care to move. And when she pulled it out, it’s roots still clung to Earth from it’s old home.
I am different and that has nothing to do with you, I wanted to tell him. Leo is different and that has nothing to do with you. You look at us and you don’t like us and you don’t even know why. I’ve seen it before a million times with Ben.
You can’t let love make you afraid.
That part was easy. Tearing up the roots will be the hard part.
Do not go gentle. So I fight. I fight the only way I know how.
I have been in the presence of a lot of greatness. And people I love who loved me back. It might be the same thing.
I can’t help being happy. I’m alive.
This summer I’d been spending a lot of time on other people’s deaths. Harley’s. Lisette’s. But somehow it had helped me feel alive. Because they weren’t my deaths. The ones that were my own were too hard to face.
She’s not the kind of person to watch someone else build a boat and set sail without her.
Go fast when I want and slow when I want.
I lift the tablet to my mouth. And then I hear a voice from a place deep in my memory. You are strong enough to go without. Fine, Grandfather, I think to myself. I will be strong enough to go without the tablet. But there are other things I’m not strong enough to go without, and I intend to fight for them.
Somewhere above us the sky seeps rain and I think of snow falling. Pictures painted with water. Poetry breathed between kisses. Too beautiful to last.
There have been Plagues all through history and that won’t end with this one.′ ‘So we’re never really safe,’ I say. ‘Oh no, my boy,’ Oker says, almost gently. ‘That might be the Society’s greatest triumph – that so many of us ever believed that we were.
But loving lets you look, and look, and look again. You notice the back of a hand, the turn of a head, the way of a walk. When you first love, you look blind and you see it all as the glorious, beloved whole, or a beautiful sum of beautiful parts. But when you see the one you love as pieces, as whys – why he walks like this, why he closes his eyes like that – you can love those parts, too, and it’s a love at once more complicated and more complete.
I’m not an animal. And I’m not your weapon. I’m not your anything.