Control was just wishful thinking, and you controlled things to hedge your bets, to be safe, to guard against loss.
Maybe we all just wanted someone to believe in. That’s all each of us wanted, and it should be so simple, but it never was simple.
Being needed was a handy trick. It could fill you up so full you never even noticed all the places that were empty.
Sometimes you build up these walls, you build and you build and you build up these walls and you think they’re so strong, but then someone can come along and tip them over with only his fingers, or the weight of his breath.
I’d always thought telling the truth to other people was hard, but maybe that was a snap compared to telling the truth to yourself. Sometimes we just refused to know what we knew.
Too often in my life, love has been defined as “humiliation with occasional roses”.
But my apology was a thousand apologies.
But what I wanted back had never really been there. He was a temporary illusion, a mirage of water after walking in the desert. I had made him up. And he could have killed me. You’ve got to stop the ride sometimes. Stop it and get off.
You take care of the people you love, but it’s true, too, that you take care of the things you own.
They never told you that stranger might be someone you knew.
What’s that about? Love must be more about power than we think, if even in its most intimate moment of expression we think about not being the one who risks the most.
I don’t know why we insist on pain when pain is so often easy to eliminate. It’s funny the ways we try to punish ourselves when we feel we’ve committed some crime.
It’s a simple truth that a secret is something you’re ashamed of.
I know parental embarrassment usually stops somewhere at fifteen, but he just kept on giving me good reasons.
I thought I might cry, the way you do when someone gives you some kindness when you most need it but when it seems the most surprising thing.
Sometimes you’ve got to make a mess before you clean it up.
The world was large, so large. Bigger than it had been before. Family, too, a bigger word. That felt like a good thing. An essential thing. There was power in numbers.
A person who says “it’s your decision” is informing you that your decision sucks.
Although I love snow, it messes things up terribly around Seattle, with all of our hills. I worry about my loved ones driving.
You could put your confusion and upset and worries into whatever book you were reading. You could sort of set them down in there, and you could come out with your head on a little straighter. I don’t why stories worked that way, but they did.