Caring doesn’t sometimes lead to misery. It always does.
Thank you for explaining that my eye cancer isn’t going to make me deaf. I feel so fortunate that an intellectual giant like yourself would deign to operate on me.
That is the fear: I have lost something important, and I cannot find it, and I need it. It is fear like if someone lost his glasses and went to the glasses store and they told him that the world had run out of glasses and he would just have to do without.
He responded a few minutes later. Okay. I wrote back. Okay. He responded: Oh, my God, stop flirting with me!
Peeing is like a good book in that it is very, very hard to stop once you start.
There is no Them. There are only facets of Us.
It seemed like forever ago, like we’ve had this brief but still infinite forever. Some infinities are bigger than other infinities.
Nothing ever happens like you imagine it will.
If people were like rain, I was like drizzle and she was a hurricane.
Margo always loved mysteries. And in everything that came afterward, I could never stop thinking that maybe she loved mysteries so much that she became one.
People will say it’s sad that she leaves a lesser scar, that fewer remember her, that she was loved deeply but not widely. But it’s not sad, Van Houten. It’s triumphant. It’s heroic. Isn’t that the real heroism? Like the doctors say: First, do no harm.
For she had embodied the Great Perhaps – she had proved to me that it was worth it to leave behind my minor life for grander maybes, and now she was gone and with her my faith in perhaps.
Nerd girls are the world’s most underutilized romantic resource. And guys, do not tell me that nerd girls are not hot because that shows a Paris Hilton-esque failure to understand hotness.
And I wanted to tell her that the pleasure for me wasn’t planning or doing or leaving; the pleasure was in seeing our strings cross and separate and then come back together.
You do not immortalize the lost by writing about them. Language buries, but does not resurrect.
Because you’re only thinking they-might-not-like-me-they-might-not-like-me, and guess what? When you act like that, no one likes you.
And in my classes, I will talk most of the time, and you will listen most of the time. Because you may be smart, but I’ve been smart longer.
How do you just stop being terrified of getting left behind and ending up by yourself forever and not meaning anything to the world?
Because there is no glory in illness. There is no meaning to it. There is no honor in dying of.
She’s cute, I thought, but you don’t need to like a girl who treats you like you’re ten: You’ve already got a mom.