She had been lost on her own and I had been lost on my own, so it was natural that once we found each other we wanted to keep being unlost with each other. But that, at heart, had made us exist.
It doesn’t work,” she continues, unclasping her hands, smoothing her skirt. “What you’re feeling right now doesn’t work. You can’t wander around and think the wandering will call them back. Believe me. I know you don’t want to hear the long view, but let me tell you. You are so young. I know it’s none of my business. But still.
By losing myself to her, I gain her.
I shed my borrowed life for an hour and put on the borrowed life of the book I’m reading.
When the heart stops, you die. Love is everywhere that life is, and if there is no love for life, you die. Giving up on love is the same thing as giving up on life itself.
I can tell from the glint in her eyes that she’s at least an acquaintance of Dorothy.
Your first time in New York, feeling like you were marching through canyons, the skyscrapers leaning over to peek down at you and your trombone.
We have fallen through the surface of want and are deep.
You won’t cry, and that makes me want to.
I am three notes in the middle of a song.
I hate that would. Straight. At the very least, those of us who are nonstraight should get to be called curvy. Or scenic. Actually, I like that: ‘Do you think she’s straight?’ ‘Oh no. She’s scenic.
Elijah, as always, is being unusually kind. While he himself is not lonely, he doesn’t mind talking to lonely people. He is the Mother Teresa of banter.
Jest when we stopped wanting to kill ourselves, we started to die.
There were days I felt like a girl and days I felt like a boy, and those days wouldn’t always correspond with the body I was in. I still believed everyone when they said I had to be one or the other. Nobody was telling me a different story, and I was too young to think for myself. I had yet to learn that when it came to gender, I was both and neither.
I love being with you and Joni and the rest of the group. I love being a part of that. But I can never really enjoy it, because I know that at the end, I’ll be back here. Sometimes I can forget, and when I can forget, it’s bliss. But this past week has been hell. It’s like I’ve been pushed back into the shape of this person I used to be. And I don’t fit into the old shape anymore. I don’t fit.
The pink-haired boy is scared, so incredibly scared – only the thing you’ve most wished for can scare you in that way.
It’s the hard things that matter. Those are the things worth leaping for.
Even though the liquid is easier to see, you have to learn to appreciate the air.
It felt good to be surrounded by books, by all this solid knowledge, by these objects that could be ripped page by page but couldn’t be torn if the pages all held together. So much of the information we received was ephemeral – pixels on screen, words passing in the air. But here I felt that thoughts had weight.
Unless you count the way the words sink into Neil, the way his life feels a little more solid than it did five minutes before.