Hope could be the most powerful thing or the most useless.
Stereotypes are fast and easy, but they are lies, and the truth takes its time.
I could forget that part, but it had to have been true.
A relationship could be a place to hide too.
Sometimes I’ve even wished there was a human pause button, where you could choose some point in your life where you could stay always.
Truth was funny, because it was an insistent thing, maybe as powerful and insistent as some force of nature, the push of water or wind. You could keep it out only so long, but it had its own will and its own needs, and maybe you could keep it at bay with lies, but not for long, not for always.
Most of our parents wanted the best for us, I knew, but we also wanted the best for them.
Maybe we all just want to feel special, even for a little while, to be fooled for a bit into feeling something besides the truth of our own ordinariness.
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.