The marks humans leave are too often scars.
The world is not a wish-granting factory.
Hocus was an old cunning attorney. The words of consecration, “Hoc est corpus,” were travestied into a nickname for jugglery, as “Hocus-pocus.”
Much of my life had been devoted to trying not to cry in front of people who loved me, so I knew what Augustus was doing. You clench your teeth. You look up. You tell yourself that if they see you cry, it will hurt them, and you will be nothing but a Sadness in their lives, and you must not become a mere sadness, so you will not cry, and you say all of this to yourself while looking up at the ceiling, and then you swallow even though your throat does not want to close and you look at the person who loves you and smile.
What else? She is so beautiful. You don’t get tired of looking at her. You never worry if she is smarter than you: You know she is. She is funny without ever being mean. I love her. I am so lucky to love her, Van Houten. You don’t get to choose if you get hurt in this world, old man, but you do have some say in who hurts you. I like my choices. I hope she likes hers.
I found myself thinking about President William McKinley, the third American president to be assassinated. He lived for several days after he was shot, and towards the end, his wife started crying and screaming, “I want to go too! I want to go too!” And with his last measure of strength, McKinley turned to her and spoke his last words: “We are all going.
I was blind and heart broken and didn’t want to do anything and Gus burst into my room and shouted, “I have wonderful news!” And I was like, “I don’t really want to hear wonderful news right now,” and Gus said, “This is wonderful news you want to hear,” and I asked him, “Fine, what is it?” and he said, “You are going to live a good and long life filled with great and terrible moments that you cannot even imagine yet!
Your now is not your forever.
Anybody can look at you. It’s quite rare to find someone who sees the same world you see.
We never really talked much or even looked at each other, but it didn’t matter because we were looking at the same sky together, which is maybe even more intimate than eye contact anyway. I mean, anybody can look at you. It’s quite rare to find someone who sees the same world you see.
You’re both the fire and the water that extinguishes it. You’re the narrator, the protagonist, and the sidekick. You’re the storyteller and the story told. You are somebody’s something, but you are also your you.
Someday no one will remember that she ever existed, I wrote in my notebook, and then, or that I did. Because memories fall apart, too. And then you’re left with nothing, left not even with a ghost but with its shadow. In the beginning, she had haunted me, haunted my dreams, but even now, just weeks later, she was slipping away, falling apart in my memory and everyone else’s, dying again.
True terror isn’t being scared; it’s not having a choice on the matter.
The worst part of being truly alone is you think about all the times you wished that everyone would just leave you be. Then they do, and you are left being, and you turn out to be terrible company.
The thing about a spiral is, if you follow it inward, it never actually ends. It just keeps tightening, infinitely.
The problem with happy endings is that they’re either not really happy, or not really endings, you know? In real life, some things get better and some things get worse. And then eventually you die.
You remember your first love because they show you, prove to you, that you can love and be loved, that nothing in this world is deserved except for love, that love is both how you become a person and why.
I was beginning to learn that your life is a story told about you, not one that you tell.
What I love about science is that as you learn, you don’t really get answers. You just get better questions.
You are as real as anyone, and your doubts make you more real, not less.