Her silhouette is obscenely green against the frost, as if she has left in her wake an artificial spring.
I thought that if I loved you hard enough, I could move mountains for you; I could make you fly. It didn’t matter to me how that happened – just as long as it did. I wasn’t thinking of who I might hurt, only who I could rescue.
I’ve had cartons of milk that have lasted longer than most of my relationships.
When you don’t keep looking back its that much easier not to trip and fall.
I knew what happened when you let yourself get close to someone, when you started to believe they loved you: you’d be disappointed.
My life is moving forward in a weird empty narrative, missing one key character, whose current life is a continuous loop.
The thing that’s important to remember about PTSD is that a traumatic event affects different people differently.
The moral of this story is that sometimes, you can attempt to make all the difference in the world, and it still is like trying to stem the tide with a sieve. The moral of this story is that no matter how much we try, no matter how much we want it... some stories just don’t have a happy ending.
What will Dad say?” he whispered. His mother could not possibly have heard him at such a distance, but she seemed to understand his question. “I imagine,” she said, stepping into a neat square of the brilliant afternoon, “he’ll say, ‘Hello, Max.
Just because you leave someone doesn’t mean you ever let them go.
My father says that a fire will burn itself out, unless you open a window and give it fuel.
I don’t think religions are based on lies, but I don’t think they’re based on truths, either. I think they come about because of what people need at the time that they need them. Like the World Series player who won’t take off his lucky socks, or the mother of the sick child who believes that her baby can sleep only if she’s sitting by the crib – believers need, by definition, something to believe in.
I wish you could know what it feels like to find the missing piece of you, the thing that makes you stronger.
When you don’t have what you want, you have to want what you have.
There’s this little acronym I was taught in grade school – it’s J-O-Y. It’s supposed to make Plain children remember that Jesus is first, Others come next, and You are last.
Could you forgive someone if she hurt you and the people you love, if she truly believed she was only trying to help? I.
What was the point of having a life if you never had the chance to live it?
Just because you had every right to feel sorry for yourself didn’t mean you ever took the opportunity to do so. In fact, sometimes I was sure that the reason people stared at you with your crutches and wheelchair had nothing to do with your disabilities, and everything to do with the fact that you had abilities they only dreamed of.
The new father finally hangs up the phone, laughing at absolutely nothing. “Congratulations,” I say, when what I really want to tell him is to pick up that baby of his and hold her tight, to set the moon on the edge of her crib and to hang her name up in stars so that she never, ever does to him what I have done to my parents.
It’s called acting. It’s not all that difficult to be the person people expect you to be. It’s harder to remember who your really are.