It always shocked me when I realized that I wasn’t the only person in the world who thought and felt such strange and awful things.
That’s part of what I like about the book in some ways. It portrays death truthfully. You die in the middle of your life, in the middle of a sentence.
I’m not saying that everything is survivable. Just that everything except the last thing is.
The town was paper, but the memories were not.
You realize that trying to keep your distance from me will not lessen my affection for you. All efforts to save me from you will fail.
You are so busy being YOU that you have no idea how utterly unprecedented you are.
I’m a grenade and at some point I’m going to blow up and I would like to minimize the casualties, okay?
Some people have lives; some people have music.
Because you are beautiful. I enjoy looking at beautiful people, and I decided a while ago not to deny myself the simpler pleasures of existence.
What you must understand about me is that I’m a deeply unhappy person.
If you don’t imagine, nothing ever happens at all.
You don’t remember what happened. What you remember becomes what happened.
At some point, you just pull off the Band-Aid, and it hurts, but then it’s over and you’re relieved.
Maybe there’s something you’re afraid to say, or someone you’re afraid to love, or somewhere you’re afraid to go. It’s gonna hurt. It’s gonna hurt because it matters.
You gave me a forever within the numbered days, and I’m grateful.
I didn’t need you, you idiot. I picked you. And then you picked me back.
The pleasure of remembering had been taken from me, because there was no longer anyone to remember with. It felt like losing your co-rememberer meant losing the memory itself, as if the things we’d done were less real and important than they had been hours before.
You like someone who can’t like you back because unrequited love can be survived in a way that once-requited love cannot.
Whenever you read a cancer booklet or website or whatever, they always list depression among the side effects of cancer. But, in fact, depression is not a side effect of cancer. Depression is a side effect of dying.
But I believe in true love, you know? I don’t believe that everybody gets to keep their eyes or not get sick or whatever, but everybody should have true love, and it should last at least as long as your life does.