I can see myself now, she said. And I can see what I want to be, ten years from now. But I don’t understand how I’m going to get from here to there.
This was the reason there was music, he realized. There were some feelings that didn’t have words big enough to describe them.
This isn’t a lie, actually. I don’t care why Edward left. All I really want to know is why I wasn’t enough to make him stay.
The best way to prevent a heartache was to cushion the coming blow.
Sometimes Chris wished he could sneak a peek at the back of the book, so to speak, and see how it was all going to turn out, so that he wouldn’t have to bother going through the motions.
When you have been burned by fire once, you don’t leap into the flames again.
Why is it that only in the very beginnings of a relationship are you aware of the heat coming from inside a person, of the number of inches you would have to move for your shoulders to brush as if it were an accident?
I could think whatever I wanted to, but realized that any promises I made myself were destined to be broken.
I loved Alex so much that it was easier to let him hurt me than to watch him hurt himself.
You figured that the only way I’d be happy is if I did the things you thought would be best for me.
There was, really, nothing you could use as a blueprint for your life, except your past. There was no starting over. There was only picking up the pieces someone had left behind.
When I was little, the great mystery to me was not how babies were made, but why?
We could all be lucky. We could all be what we want to be, instead of who someone else told us to be.
I closed my eyes and curled my fists around the things I knew for sure: That a scallop has thirty-five eyes, all blue. That a tuna will suffocate if it ever stops swimming. That I was loved. That this time, it was not me who broke.
I have come to believe that this life I’m wearing will never really fit.
You have to understand what you’re missing before you can really feel a loss.
I think there are crossroads in our lives when we make grand, sweeping decisions without even realizing it.
You may be real, but you’re still stuck in a book.
Talking out loud to fictional characters is just the tip of the iceberg.
Maybe the reason I’ve never died in this story is that I’ve never had something worth dying for before.