Anyway, madness and genius. They’re the disturbed pals of the human condition. The Bonnie and Clyde, the Thelma and Louise, the baking soda and vinegar. Insanity just walks alongside the brilliant like some creepy, insistent shadow.
If time heals all wounds, and a book can hold a person’s entire life, then you can speed up the process with a pulp time warp.
Darkness does this. It finds all the places you are hiding in. It finds all the things you are holding onto tightly and makes you let go.
It can be exhausting eating a meal cooked by a man. With a woman, it’s, Ho hum, pass the beans. A guy, you have to act like he just built the Taj Mahal.
Maybe I was being too picky. Maybe I didn’t want to be close to anyone. Maybe I’d just be the type who couldn’t feel love all the way or something. I couldn’t tell what was wrong, but what was wrong was that it just wasn’t right.
One of the hardest tasks as a human being is knowing when to keep an open mind, and when not to.
My subconscious speaks in a foreign language.
My father said that love at first sight should send you running, if you know what’s good for you. It’s your dark pieces having instant recognition with their dark pieces, he says. You’re an idiot if you think it means you’ve met your soul mate. So I was an idiot.
She’d be one of those parents who left a kid behind at a rest stop, driving for miles before she noticed. We’d hear about her on the evening news.
They say religion is about love, but you wonder how much of it really is about fear.
I tended to give a book a chance and another chance and another, sometimes seeing it all the way to the end, still hoping for for it turn out different. Maybe I was confused about what you owed a book. What you owed people, for that matter, real or fictional.
It was all the things you could never understand and could never possess that made you ache.
Empathy took the edge off, and the truth is, we need our edge. Our edge is trying to speak to us, and we are too, too good at shutting it up.
But, dear God, don’t listen to me. I’m an old lady in the middle of nowhere without a real toilet.
Funny the only two times we use the phrase “seeing someone” are when we are referring to being in a a relationship or getting psychological help.
Hurt is a weapon. Better weapon than most because it doesn’t look like one.
An untold story has a weight that can submerge you, sure as a sunken ship at the bottom of the ocean.
We are thickly layered, page lying upon page, behind simple covers. And love – it is not the book itself, but the binding.
The most true-love words are not the ones that grasp and hold and bind you, twisting you both up together in some black dance. No, they are ones that leave you free to stand alone on your own solid ground, leave him to do the same, a tender space between you.
We’re as good at talking ourselves out of fear as into it, aren’t we? Maybe better.