Maybe some people just had trouble with forever.
Maybe sometimes you just feel like everything can be taken from you all at once.
A person could leave you so quickly. So much history and time and memories, but they snuck away from you, and other things took their place. How could you hold on? Wait. A bigger question. The biggest. How could you hold on and let go?
There are so many different fifteens. And eighteens. And forty-twos, for that matter. Mature fifteens and young fifteens and wise fifteens and lost fifteens. And angry fifteens.
Stories took twists and turns down fairy-tale paths or down very human everyday ones. You think you’re at the end of the book, and it’s only the end of a chapter.
The scariest part of forever is that nothing is.
The hurt affects your ability to go forward.
I don’t know why we do it. But sometimes we just swim straight for the net.
She would bring you some great book because she was a book matchmaker, because she loved books the way other girls loved clothes.
But an apology too – you think you’re giving something, but you’re not. You’re really asking for something. You’re asking for forgiveness, you’re asking for the other injured person to make it okay for you. Apologies were harder work for the person getting one than the person giving one.
You were a stone wall, a fort in high, unreachable trees, an island, my own island, that no boat could reach.
A lot of life is just surviving what happens.
It occurred to me then that a lot of life was either about wanting and not having, or having and not wanting.
To an untrained eye, need and love were as easily mistaken for each other as the real master’s painting and a forgery.
We don’t want you convicted for condiment theft. You go to that prison, you’ll meet big-time operators. Maple syrup stealers.
You were supposed to have hope, right? You were supposed to respect its power and hold on. And so I did. I held, and held, and let hope fill me. But as the days went on, it seemed I could be holding for a long, long time. Hope could be the most powerful thing or the most useless.
I would have spoken, had my heart not been in my throat.
Maybe a person’s world can grow bigger in all the right ways, not too wide that it becomes shallow, just large enough to preserve its depth.
Love seems to be something to approach with caution, as if you’d come across a wrapped box in the middle of the street and have no idea what it contains.
Things that came apart could be put together again, but never exactly the same.