He who wants the world must first escape from it.
I think one of the reasons it ended was that his eyes never lit up for me the way they did for classical music. I realize that in the long run I may not be as wonderful as a Brahms symphony but I think I’m good for a Haydn quintet.
All over the world are particular people, and you could be happy with probably five or six of them, eight if you’re bisexual and everyone is.
You know, despite all my world-weariness and cynicism, I think I’ve always believed that there is one person in the universe for whom you are truly meant – and the fact that sometimes there are two or even more people on the earth you can fall in love with really bothers me. It suggests that if you work hard you can be meant for anyone.
Forever and ever, world without end.
And I almost said I love you. Instead I said nothing and you said nothing.
I never told you that, even after telling you I love you, all those times all that day, I never told you how beautiful it was then, like everyone was telling us not to be.
Another gift, another secret, another time to lean in and kiss me.
This is love, to sit with someone you’ve known forever in a place you’ve been meaning to go, and watching as their life happens to them until you stand up and it’s time to go. You don’t care about yours. Why should it change, the love you feel, no matter how death goes?
Treat reluctance like seasickness,” Errol said, picking something off his sleeve. “If you feel it, focus on the horizon.
I was so angry I knew it would boomerang someplace sometime soon.
I couldn’t wait to see then again, beautiful things. Extraordinary.
No, when you love someone you spend hours and hours with them, and even the mightiest forces in the netherworld could not say whether the hours you spend increase your love or if you simply spend more hours with someone as your love increases.
After all, I was only eighteen then. I’m almost twenty now. I learned lots about narrative structure in my Honors English classes so I know what I’m doing.
I’m a lunatic wandering around for scraps, I’m like every single miserable moron I’ve scorned, and pretended I didn’t recognize. I’m all of them, every last ugly thing in a bad last-minute costume. I’m not different, not at all, not different from any other speck of a thing.
Relax,” she said. “You will be wise. You’re young. You can’t have everything right away.” When something simple and true takes you by surprise, it hits you in the stomach.
Come on in,” I said again, and he came on in and I hugged him. I felt his arms, warm through the linen. Suddenly there was a reason to leave the house and see other humans, because some of them were good.
Phil Needle supposed what he meant was that he wanted to be God, just long enough to find his daughter. It was not a prayer but a promotion. This was why nobody liked God: they wanted his job.
This is complicated,” you said, back on the napkin, and then looked at me. You wanted to pry me open, I could see it, drag me across our boundaries so we could feast together in secret from the rest of the world. “But,” you said, “no, not but. I love you.
It’s okay to like jerks. I mean, it’d be better to like a nice guy, but there aren’t any.