My life changes all the time, but books don’t change. My reading of them changes – I can bring new things to them each time. But the words are familiar words. The world is a place you’ve been before, and it welcomes you back.
I am shy. Sometimes painfully shy. And it’s especially painful when someone reminds me about it.
We’re told that the most powerful words in the world are ‘I love you.’ And while I think those are powerful, I think equally powerful is this phrase: I have started to know you, and I want to know more.
The day it happened, the week after it happened-those were not times I wanted to go back to. How I felt like I was trapped in a chamber of my own noise. Sitting in class and not being there at all. Sitting in a chair and fragmenting at the same time. Clutching to the random facts. Thinking the concept of a fact was itself a fiction. Because we live in a blur. All of us live in a blur.
With that right person, you can have a late-night conversation at any time of the day.
It was an exquisite irony: Just when we stopped wanting to kill ourselves, we started to die. Just when we were feeling strength, it was taken from us. This should not happen to you. Adults can talk all they want about youth feeling invincible. Surely, some of us had that bravado. But there was also the dark inner voice telling us we were doomed. And then we were doomed. And then we weren’t. You should never feel doomed.
If act one in life is about finding yourself, then act two is about finding everyone else.
There are some days you know ahead of time are going to be important, but most of the important ones end up catching you by surprise. the best thing to do is to treat all your days well. Then see what happens.
It is a sound like loneliness – enough to let you know you’re there, but not enough to fill you with life.
Kind of. Is missing something proof of how much you were into it in the first place?
What a powerful word, future. Of all the abstractions we can articulate to ourselves, of all the concepts we have that other animals do not, how extraordinary the ability to consider a time that’s never been experienced. And how tragic not to consider it. It galls us, we with such a limited future, to see someone brush it aside as meaningless, when it has an endless capacity for meaning, and an endless number of meanings that can be found within it.
We wish we could offer you a creation myth, an exact reason why you are the way you are, why when you read this sentence, you will know it’s about you.
I realized I would always be missing something. That no matter what I did, I would always be missing something else. And the only way to live, the only way to be happy, was to make sure the things I didn’t miss meant more to me than the things I missed. I had to think about what I wanted, outside the heat of wanting.
The things you love are the things that will destroy you.
He counts as an ex because he made me feel dumped even without making me feel loved first.
One last song. One last turn. One last street. No matter how hard you try to keep hold of a day, it’s going to leave you” -Rhiannon.
At least I’d learn the lesson that friends can make up for the failings of your family.
He was beautiful in the way that a breeze is beautiful – the kind of beauty you feel gratitude for.
Such a strange thing, to hold a six-year-old’s hand. Especially a six-year-old you’ve only just met. A toddler will grab hold of your finger, and someone your own age will clasp on to your whole hand, but with six-year-olds it’s something in between, this acknowledgment that they can’t be the one to take hold, so you have to do all the holding, folding your hand around theirs, feeling so much bigger and responsible.
It’s good to share a life – and it’s good to share minutes and hours, too, Danny thinks. With a wife. With a husband. With a boyfriend, girlfriend, best friend. With a fling. With a brother.