I fear your faith has been mis- placed – but then, faith usually is.
All representations of a thing are inherently abstract.
You and me will read a book and find three interesting things that we remember. But Colin finds everything intriguing. He reads a book about presidents and he remembers more of it because everything he reads clicks in his head as fugging interesting.
Colin emphatically pushed the book cover shut when he finished reading. “Did you like it?” His dad asked. “Yup,” Colin said. He liked all books, because he liked the mere act of reading, the magic of turning scratches on a page into words inside his head.
The future lay before him, inevitable but invisible.
Barnacles on the container ship of consciousness.
If we’d put them in a vase in the living room, they would have been everyone’s flowers. I wanted them to be my flowers.
I’m not saying it was your fault. I’m saying it wasn’t nice.
They were angry, I thought. Horrified. These teenagers, with their hormones, making out beneath a video broadcasting the shattered voice of a former father.
It’s almost as if the way you imagine my dead self says more about you than it says about either the person I was or the whatever I am now.
And I put the latte down on a table, awash in the happy middle of my greatest adventure.
The true ninja doesn’t make a splash at all.
Colin Singleton’s distance from his glasses made him realize the problem: myopia. He was nearsighted. The future lay before him, inevitable but invisible.
The French verb aimer has two meanings. And that’s why he liked her, and loved her. She spoke to him in a language that, no matter how hard you studied it, could not be completely understood.
Throughout the book, she refers to herself as “the side effect,” which is just totally correct. Cancer kids are essentially side effects of the relentless mutation that made the diversity of life on earth possible.
The sun was a toddler insistently refusing to go to bed: It was past eight thirty and still light.
Breaking up isn’t something that gets done to you; its something that happens with you.
She’s just playing a trick on us. This is just an Alaska Young Prank Extraordinaire. It’s Alaska being Alaska, funny and playful and not knowing when or how to put on the brakes.
And it was just the three of us – three bodies and two people – the three who knew what had happened and too many layers between all of us too much keeping us from one another.
Late in the winter of my seventeenth year, my mother decided I was depressed, presumably because I rarely left the house, spent quite a lot of time in bed, read the same book over and over, ate infrequently, and devoted quite a bit of my abundant free time to thinking about death.