You never worry if she is smarter than you: You know she is.
So often, nothing could deliver me from fear, but then sometimes, just listening to Daisy did the trick. She’d straightened something inside me, and I no longer felt like I was in a whirlpool or walking an ever-tightening spiral.
I realized in the silence that followed that I hadn’t spoken a single word – and even though I laughed with them, it felt like I was watching a movie about my life instead of living it. And then they went back to talking, everyone telling stories, laughing, I tried to smile and shake my head at the right times, but I was always a moment behind the rest of them. They laughed because something was funny. I laughed because they had.
I remembered Daisy throwing daddy longlegs at me because she knew I hated them, and I’d scream and run away, flailing my arms but not actually scared, because back then all emotions felt like play, like I was experimenting with feeling rather than stuck with it. True terror isn’t being scared; it’s not having a choice in the matter.
El problema de una espiral es que si la recorres, en realidad nunca acaba. Se estrecha infinitamente.
The food was so good that with each passing course, our conversation devolved further into fragmented celebrations of its deliciousness: “I want this dragon carrot risotto to become a person so I can take it to Las Vegas and marry it.” “Sweet-pea sorbet, you are so unexpectedly magnificent.
The greatest weapon against stress is our ability to choose one thought over another.” – WILLIAM JAMES I don’t know what superpower William James enjoyed, but I can no more choose my thoughts than choose my name.
You think I needed you? You don’t think I could have given Myrna Mountweazel a Benadryl so she’d sleep through my stealing the safe from under my parents’ bed? Or snuck into your bedroom while you were sleeping and taken your car key? I didn’t need you, you idiot. I picked you. And then you picked me back.” Now she looked at me. “And that’s like a promise. At least for tonight. In sickness and in health. In good times and in bad. For richer, for poorer. Till dawn do us part.
But this was the truth, a pitiful boy who desperately wanted not to be pitiful, screaming and crying, poisoned by an infected G-tube that kept him alive, but not alive enough.
If the future is forever, he thought, then eventually it will swallow us all up. Even Colin could only name a handful of people who lived, say, 2,400 years ago. In another 2,400 years, even Socrates, the most well-known genius of that century, might be forgotten. The future will erase everything – there’s no level of fame or genius that allows you to transcend oblivion. The infinite future makes that kind of mattering impossible. But there’s another way. There are stories.
I remember what I’ve imagined and imagine what I remember.
Writing is a profession for introverts who want to tell you a story but don’t want to make eye contact while doing it.
It’s the eternal struggle, Pudge. The Good versus the Naughty.
Things belong to the people that use them, not to the people who create them.
Life is worrisome.
I’ll keep taking deep breaths because it feels like the wind got knocked out of me. For all my not crying, I sure feel a hell of a lot worse than I did at the end of All Dogs Go to Heaven.
None of them work.” “None of them have worked yet,” she corrected.
I disgusted myself. I was revolting, but I couldn’t recoil from my self because I was stuck inside of it.
You don’t have to be afraid of that thought. Thought is not action.
I felt that I owed a debt to the universe that only my attention could repay, and also that I owed a debt to everybody who didn’t get to be a person anymore and everyone who hadn’t gotten to be a person yet. What my dad had told me, basically.