There is no such thing as a fact. There is only how you saw the fact, in a given moment. How you reported the fact. How your brain processed that fact. There is no extrication of the storyteller from the story.
Love has nothing to do with what you’re looking at and everything to do with who’s looking.
You can’t blame someone if they honestly don’t understand that their reality isn’t the same as yours.
It was always easier for me to show love than to say it. The word reminded me of pralines: small, precious, almost unbearable sweet. I would light up in his presence; I felt like a sun in the constellation of his embrace. But trying to put what I felt for him into words diminished it somehow, like pinning a butterfly under glass, or videotaping a comet.
Maybe growing up is just focusing on what you’ve got, instead of what you don’t.
Pride is an evil dragon; it sleeps underneath your heart and then roars when you need silence.
Words got in the way. The things we felt the hardest – like what it was like to have a boy touch you as if you were made of light, or what it meant to be the only person in the room who wasn’t noticed – weren’t sentences; they were knots in the wood of our bodies, places where our blood flowed backward. If you asked me, not that anyone ever did, the only words worth saying were I’m sorry.
A bruise is how the body remembers it’s been wronged.
Annie turned away, her eyes glittering. ‘Here’s what no one tells you,’ she said. ‘When you deliver a fetus, you get a death certificate, but not a birth certificate. And afterward, your milk comes in, and there’s nothing you can do to stop it.’ She looked up at me. ‘You can’t win. Either you have the baby and wear your pain on the outside, or you don’t have the baby, and you keep that ache in you forever. I know I didn’t do the wrong thing. But I don’t feel like I did the right thing, either.
In the wild, an elephant mother and daughter stay in close proximity their whole lives; I hope I am that lucky.
I’ve never been in love, but I’ve always imagined it – weirdly – like some sort of OxiClean commercial. The TV host shows a scene from an ordinary day, and then takes a big old sponge soaked in love and swipes away the stains. Suddenly that same scene is missing all the mistakes, all the loneliness. The colors are like jewels, ten times richer than they were before. The music is louder and clearer. “Love,” the host will say, “makes life a little brighter.
You know what I noticed when I was with Jacob? In your world, people can reach each other in an instant. There’s the telephone, and the fax – and on the computer you can talk to someone all the way around the world. You’ve got people telling their secrets on TV talk shows, and magazines that publish pictures of movie stars trying to hide their homes. All those connections, but everyone there seems so lonely.
A wish is just words. Belief is the catalyst. It’s what sets that wish into motion.
Do you remember the summer we signed you up for camp? And the night before you left, you said you’ve changed your mind and wanted to stay home? I told you to to get a seat on the left side of the bus, so when you pulled away, you’d be able to look back and see me there waiting for you.” I press her hand against my cheek, hard enough to leave a mark. “You get that same seat in Heaven. One where you can watch me, watching you.
I’m the princess in an ivory tower, except every brick is made of history, and I built this prison myself.
We are all drowning slowly in the tide of our opinions, oblivious that we are taking on water every time we open our mouths.
Sometimes I think there’s no such thing as falling in love. It’s just the fear of losing someone.
In a lot of ways, having a teenager isn’t all that different from having a newborn. You learn to read the reactions, because they’re incapable of saying exactly what it is that’s causing pain.
Laws are black and white. The lives of women are a thousand shades of gray.
You don’t look at another person’s plate to see if they have more than you. You look to see if they have enough.