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.
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.