You could feel things or you could find a way to shut down. But once you were feeling things, you couldn’t decide exactly what to feel. That was the trouble with letting them in at all. They made a mess of the place.
She used to cry roughly three times a year. Now she seemed to cry three times before breakfast. Could that be considered progress?
The ocean was the best place, of course. That was what she loved most. It was a feeling of freedom like no other, and yet a feeling of communion with all the other places and creatures the water touched.
You have been with me from the very first life. You are my first memory every time, the single thread in all of my lives. It’s you who makes me a person.
You’ll turn out ordinary if you’re not careful.
I love you, I’ll never stop.
Particularly beautiful people were like particularly funny-looking people, though. Once you know them you mostly forgot about it.
You just have to let people love you in the way they can.
Wish for what you want, work for what you need. -Carmen’s grandmother.
What made you feel that stomach-churning agony for one person and not another? If Bridget were God, she would have made it against the law for you to feel that way about someone without them having to feel it for you right back.
If you didn’t have a choice, you had to make a choice. If you didn’t have options, you made some. You couldn’t just let this world happen to you... he didn’t see eternity. He saw this girl and this moment and this one slim chance.
Maybe the truth is there’s a little bit of loser in all of us you know, being happy isn’t having everything in your life being perfect. Maybe it’s about stringing together all the little things. Making those count more then the bad stuff. Maybe we just get through it and that’s all we can ask for.
You get older and you learn there is one sentence, just four words long, and if you can say it to yourself it offers more comfort than almost any other. It goes like this... Ready? At least I tried.
You could feel things or you could find a way to shut down. But once you were feeling things, you couldn’t decide exactly what to feel.
There was a satisfaction in being right and a terror in finding so much evidence that the world didn’t work the way you or most other people thought it did.
She remembered me.′ This was his worst weakness, his most toxic drug.
I tell myself your spirits were down the day you wrote. You’re fine and we’re fine. I hope it’s true.
The thing you had had and loved and taken for granted caught up with you all at once and for no sensible reason suddenly cost more than you could afford.
She was so much softer then, so much more willing to fall in love, or believe she was.
Maybe happiness was just a matter of the little upticks. The traffic signal that said walk the second you got there, that happened to every person in the course of a day.