That’s what I realized: if I did get her back somehow, she wouldn’t fill the hole that losing her created.
I don’t even know how ugly and pretty get decided.
The act of leaning in to kiss someone, or asking them, is fraught with the possibility of rejection, so the person least likely to get rejected should do the leaning in or the asking.
He missed her like crazycakes.
I just want to fly under the radar, because when you start to make yourself into a big deal, that’s when you get shot down.
He missed his imagined future.
See, popularity is complicated. You have to spend a lot of time thinking about liking; you have to really like being liked, and also sort like being disliked.
It’s so easy to get stuck. You just get caught in being something, being special or cool or whatever, to the point where you don’t even know why you need it; you just think you do.
And he found himself thinking that maybe stories don’t just make us matter to each other – maybe they’re also the only way to the infinite mattering he’d been after for so long.
And he was feeling not-unique in the very best possible way.
I would always love Alaska Young, my crooked neighbor, with all my crooked heart.
She smiled with all the delight of a kid on Christmas morning and said, “Y’all smoke to enjoy it. I smoke to die.” – Alaska.
Worry is yet another side effect of dying.
He liked the idea of coffee quite a lot – a warm drink that gave you energy and had been for centuries associated with sophisticates and intellectuals. But coffee itself tasted to him like caffeinated stomach bile.
I do, Augustus. I do.
Every paper girl needs at least one string.
Nothing is as boring as other people’s dreams.
She said ‘I love you’ as if it were a secret, and an immense one.
In the end, what you do isn’t going to be nearly as interesting or important as who you do it with.
I’m just reveling in the glory of not having to hear the neediness and impotence of my own voice.