I wondered if I was more addicted to being sad than I was to bourbon or cocaine.
Somewhere out there, she thinks, there must be a man who wasn’t raised to believe his every cough in a woman’s presence is somehow a gift to her.
Forcing breath into her lungs, she slides into the passenger seat. She wants to meet Luke’s joke with one of her own, wants to look him in the eye and return his sheepish smile. But she can’t. She can’t because the world seems too small all of a sudden. Because her life, once again, has been reduced to a thin stream moving through a channel carved by psychopaths.
Whoever said you can’t go home again was just engaging in a bunch of wishful thinking.
Know this. It is not the living who are haunted by the dead – it is the dead who are haunted by the living.
I never anticipated that just kissing someone could be an event. With different stages and acts. The slow approach. The commitment. The taste. The smell. The withdrawal and then going back in for a second taste, a deeper one.
You never hate someone that much unless you’re afraid of him.
A sense of peace comes over her. She realizes, for the first time in her life, that deciding to be strong doesn’t mean you get to decide what you’ll endure and when.
Dream big or die in your sleep.
She doesn’t have to work to blend in because in the French Quarter, all you have to do to blend in is dance with the chaos.
You told me about what you called the light in the darkness. About how life was neither good nor bad, but a combination of both and occasionally good things pop up in the middle of tragedy, but they still don’t make tragedy go away. They can’t protect you. They’re just light. But what you didn’t say is that sometimes, certain people can be a light in the darkness. There are some people in this world who are worth saving when other people decide they shine the wrong kind of light on the wrong.
The light in the darkness, as Stephen explained it, did not chase away the shadows of fear and regret: It merely illuminated the fears worth fighting. It lit the paths dictated by fate and choice, rather than casting a celestial glow on the way to a better and more perfect world. Although.
Because they expect to be relieved of every ache and pain and bad mood, as if being alive itself is a pathological condition, and someone, somewhere is responsible for fixing it.
Sometimes, if we wear them long enough, chains can seem like clothes.
So busy looking for ghosts in the attic, we never think to look in the ground.
How eating became a source of constant fear and worry. There’s a shot of her standing outside the window of a New York deli, staring at the sandwiches inside like an orphan watching a happy family enjoy Christmas dinner.
But in general, who’s to say what’s not gay enough? And how do we even raise that question without raising the far more perilous one of, “Is it too gay?
And he wonders if he has a space in his brain or in his soul for monsters and demons, or if he will, like most people, choose insanity when confronted with a fearsome reality.
This is what it means to have real family, she’d realized as they lowered the casket into the ground. This is part of loving and being loved, and without it, you cannot have the other parts, the joyful parts.
Why do these people like pain so much?