I have the soul of a private jet owner, and the life of a public transportation rider. It’s a real tragedy.
I would always be like this, always have this within me. There was no beating it. I would never slay the dragon, because the dragon was also me. My self and the disease were knotted together for life.
And I knew I would remember that feeling, underneath the split-up sky, back before the machinery of fate ground us into one thing or another, back when we could still be everything.
Dr. Singh told me once that if you have a perfectly tuned guitar and a perfectly tuned violin in the same room, and you pluck the D string of a guitar, then all the way across the room, the D string on the guitar will also vibrate. I could always feel my mother’s vibrating strings.
A poem can’t do its work if you only read snippets of it.
Welcome to the future, Holmesy. It’s not about hacking computers anymore; it’s about hacking human souls.
Maybe we invented metaphor as a response to pain. Maybe we needed to give shape to the opaque, deep-down pain that evades both sense and senses.
Reading with an eye towards metaphor allows us to become the person we’re reading about, while reading about them. That’s why there is symbols in books and why your English teacher deserves your attention. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter if the author intended the symbol to be there because the job of reading is not to understand the author’s intent. The job of reading is to use stories as a way into seeing other people as a we ourselves.
There is always the risk: something is good and good and good and good, and then all at once it gets awkward. All at once, she sees you looking at her, and then she doesn’t want to joke around with you anymore, because she doesn’t want to seem flirty, because she doesn’t want you to think she likes you. It’s such a disaster, whenever, in the course of human relationships, someone begins to chisel away at the wall of separation between friendship and kissing.
Sometimes you happen to run across a brilliant run of radio songs, where each tie one station goes to commercial, you scan to another that has just started to play a song you love but had almost forgotten about, a song you never would’ve picked but turns out to be perfect for shouting along to.
You are my favorite person. I want to be buried next to you. we’ll have a shared tombstone. It’ll read, ‘Holmesy and Daisy: They did everything together, except the nasty.
I want the past back, no matter the cost. It doesn’t matter that it won’t come back, that it never even actually existed as I remember it – I want it back. I want things to be like they were, or like I remember them having been: Whole.
When I was little, my dad used to tell me, “Will, you can pick your friends, and you can pick your nose, but you can’t pick your friends nose.
I was a story riddled with plot holes.
Me: I like being outside at night. It gives me this weird feeling, like I’m homesick but not for home. It’s kind of a good feeling, though.
I felt certain something was going to kill me, and of course I was right: Something is going to kill you, someday, and you can’t know if this is the day.
I could still be anybody.
But you give your thoughts too much power, Aza. Thoughts are only thoughts. They are not you. You do belong to yourself, even when your thoughts don’t.
What’s the difference between who you are and what you have? Maybe nothing.
And the thing is, when you lose someone, you realize you’ll eventually lose everyone.