Uh-uh, dude. I tried it your way with the dating and the girls and the kissing and the drama, and man, I didn’t like it. Plus, my best friend is a walking cautionary tale of what happens to you when romantic relationships don’t involve marriage. Like you always say, kafir, everything ends in breakup, divorce, or death. I want to narrow my misery options to divorce or death – that’s all.
Being vulnerable is asking to get used.
You think you’re the painter, but you’re the canvas.
Does it hurt?′ I nodded. ‘You know Sekou Sundiata, in a poem, he said the most important part of the body ’ain’t the heart or the lungs or the brain. The biggest, most important part of the body is the part that hurts.
My father died suddenly, but also across the years. He was still dying, really – which meant I guess that he was still living, too.
You are not a grenade, not to us. Thinking about you dying makes us sad, Hazel, but you are not a grenade. You are amazing. You can’t know, sweetie, because you’ve never had a baby become a brilliant young reader with a side interest in horrible television shows, but the joy you bring us is so much greater than the sadness we feel about your illness.
The madness of wealth,” my mother mumbled. “Sometimes you think you’re spending money, but all along the money’s spending you.
My whole life I though I was the star of an overly earnest romance movie, and it turns out I was in a goddamned buddy comedy all along.
The whole problem with boys is that ninety-nine percent of them are, like, okay. If you could dress and hygiene them properly, and make them stand up straight and listen to you and not be dumbasses, they’d be totally acceptable.
You are somebody’s something, but you are also your you.
She didn’t understand why it was happening,” he said. “I had to tell her she would die. Her social worker said I had to tell her. I had to tell her she would die, so I told her she was going to heaven. She asked if I would be there, and I said that I would not, not yet. But eventually, she said, and I promised that yes, of course, very soon. And I told her that in the meantime we had great family up there that would take care of her. And she asked me when I would be there, and I told her soon. Twenty-two years ago.
You’d think solving mysteries would bring you closure, that closing the loop would comfort and quiet your mind. But it never does. The truth always disappoints.
Reading someone’s poetry is like seeing them naked” -Davis Pritchett.
So I was ugly. I was never fat, really, and I never wore headgear or had zits or anything. But I was ugly. I don’t even know how ugly and pretty get decided – maybe there’s like a secret cabal of boys who meet in the locker room and decide who’s ugly and who’s hot, because as far as I can remember, there was no such thing as a hot fourth-grader. – Lindsey Lee Wells.
Love is not a tragedy or a failure, but a gift.
Physical space between us evaporates. We play the broken strings of our instruments one last time.
Its a paper town, with paper houses and paper people, everything is uglier up close.
For some reason, I wanted to tell him the truth. “Whether it hurts is kind of irrelevant.” “That’s a pretty good life motto,” he said.
On some fundamental level we find it difficult to understand that other people are human beings in the same way that we are.
You don’t know a father’s weight until it’s lifted.