The only thing I am allowed, the only thing I am given, is myself. It is enough, but only barely.
The supernatural is natural, and wonderment can come from the most mundane movement, like a heartbeat or a glance.
I was always thinking in terms of too much or not enough, rarely allowing myself that crucial space in between. Except when he was around. Except when we were really together. Then I could forget – I couldn’t turn it off, but I could forget to turn it on. Gradually, the columns began to tip. I lost track of keeping track. In order to let us be, I let myself be.
Whether keenly striking or laughably awful, contemporary art is rarely unentertaining.
How did you know it was me?” I have to ask. “The way you looked at me,” she says. “It couldn’t have been anyone else.” This.
In the next election, I’m voting for your mom to be the next God,” Tony says when I pick up the phone.
You never asked what my anthem was. But that’s okay, because I still don’t know what I’d answer.
I once told him that the best way to break up a fight is to step between the two people and start singing ancient folk songs. But I’d never heard of anyone actually doing such a thing.
I’ve tried breaking things to feel better – and found that it only feels better while things are breaking, not the next moment, when they’re broken. It’s a release that leads to nowhere.
I know I am lying to myself, but I also choose to believe it.
But this is what losing most of your friends does: It makes you unafraid.
Every ounce of his soul tells him this will make a good story to tell his friends – an anecdote in the biography, an incident in the life. But part of the sorrow he feels – and it is that – comes from the distance he sees between himself and the storytelling, the hole that has ripped open between the here and the there.
These books are always there for me. All of them are there for me. My life changes all the time, but books don’t change.
The thing about a spotlight is that you have to step into it. You have to get onto that stage.
But no relationship should rely on you blocking out the world. The world will always get in.
I hate the phrase ‘more than friends’,” Joni told me one night not long ago. “It’s such nonsense. When I’m going out with someone, we’re not ‘more than friends’ – most of the time, we’re not even friends. ‘More than friends’ makes no sense. Look at us. There’s nothing more than us.
I didn’t mean to fall in love with you. But it happened. And I can’t erase it. I can’t ignore it. I have lived my whole life like this, and you’re the thing that has made me wish it could stop.
Don’t get trapped into thinking people are halves instead of wholes. TINY: People are halves? LYNDA: They’re not trying to sell you on it yet, but believe me, they will. The idea that two is the ideal, and that one is only good as half of two. You are not a half, and you should never treat someone else like a half. Agreed?
Please tell me this pity party ends early. Or at least serves cake.
The words were clumsy in my mouth, like typing with hammers.