You are buying into the cross-stitched sentiments of your parents’ throw pillows. You’re arguing that the fragile, rare thing is beautiful simply because it is fragile and rare. But that’s a lie, and you know it.
Before that, we were just looking at ideas of each other, like looking at your window shade but never seeing inside. But once the vessel cracks, the light can get in. The light can get out.
Sometimes you think you’re spending money, but all along the money’s spending you.” She glanced down at her cup of tea, and then back up to me. “But only if you worship it. You serve whatever you worship.
There are infinite numbers between 0 and 1... there is a a bigger infinite set of numbers between 1 and 2...
It seemed to me that one defining features of parents is they don’t get paid to love you.
The term chronic pain captures nothing of the grinding, constant, ceaseless, inescapable hurt. And the term crazy arrives at us with none of the terror and worry you live with.
Still perfect,” he said. “Read to me.” “This isn’t really a poem to read aloud when you are sitting next to your sleeping mother. It has, like, sodomy and angel dust in it,” I said. “You just named two of my favorite pastimes,” he said.
The fact that Augustus made me feel special did not necessarily indicate that I was special.
The prank is entitled “Subverting the Patriarchal Paradigm”.
Yeah, well, she’s known me since I was a baby. And she cares about us. But she also gets paid to care about us, you know? And if she didn’t... I mean, she’d have to find a different job.
Yeah, and your dad is a Smits fan, which helps. You think they liked me?” “Sure they did. Who cares, though? They’re just parents.” “They’re your parents,” he said, glancing over at me. “Plus, I like being liked. Is that crazy?
But you fear oblivion.” “Sure, I fear earthly oblivion. But, I mean, not to sound like my parents, but I believe humans have souls, and I believe in the conservation of souls. The oblivion fear is something else, fear that I won’t be able to give anything in exchange for my life. If you don’t live a life in service of a greater good, you’ve gotta at least die a death in service of a greater good, you know? And I fear that I won’t get either a life or a death that means anything.
It occurred to me why they call it eye contact.
I know. Apparently the world is not a wish-granting factory.” That made me smile a little.
Honestly, I don’t even like my type of girl that much, let alone other types. Not that I’m asexual or something – I just find Romance Drama unbearable.
Of course, I had hoped that Peter Van Houten would be sane, but the world is not a wish-granting factory.
There will come a time,” I said, “when all of us are dead. All of us. There will come a time when there are no human beings remaining to remember that anyone ever existed or that our species ever did anything. There will be no one left to remember Aristotle or Cleopatra, let alone you. Everything that we did and built and wrote and thought and discovered will be forgotten and all of this” – I gestured encompassingly – “will have been for naught.
Keys show up when you reconcile yourself to the bus; Katherines appear when you start to disbelieve the world contains another Katherine; and, sure enough, the Eureka moment arrived just as he began to accept it would never come.
Wealth is careless – so around it, you must be careful.
My children are grown-ups., so you and Noah are my only little boys I have left.