Not everything is black and white. Much as we would like it to be.
The hardest thing about talking to teenagers, I had discovered, was that whatever you said inevitably came across like something an elderly aunt would say at a wedding.
Teenagers are basically toddlers with hormones – old enough to want to do stuff without having any of the common sense.
Around me a million people are living, breathing, eating, arguing. A million lives completely divorced from mine. It is a strange sort of peace.
Sometimes, she told herself, life was a series of obstacles that just had to be negotiated, possibly through sheer act of will. She stared out at the muddy blue of the endless sea, gulped in the air, lifted her chin, and decided that she could survive this. She could survive most things. It was nobody’s right to be happy, after all.
Live boldly. Push yourself. Don’t settle. Just live well. Just live.
If he has love, he will feel he can go on. Without it, I would have sunk many times over.
I had put on a bright yellow T-shirt in the hope that it would make me look happier than I felt.
Just for carrying on, really. Sometimes, my darling girl, that’s heroic in itself.
I think about your sister a lot. I think about Will too. When people we love die young it’s a nudge, reminding us that we shouldn’t take any of it for granted, that we have a duty to make the most of what we have. I feel like I finally get that.
It’s the fact that when you spend all day in proximity to someone, there is no escape from their moods. Or your own.
I felt everything more intensely, saw everything as if a filter had been removed.
I don’t know. Maybe I just believe in second chances.
I can tell you the exact day I stopped being fearless.
Because there would be lonely days. And bad days. And days when I wondered what the hell I had just agreed to be part of. Because that was all part of the adventure too.
The key was making sure that anyone you allowed to walk beside you didn’t get to decide which you were, and pin you down like a butterfly in a case. The key was to know that you could always somehow find a way to reinvent yourself again.
All the stuff that was important or interesting about me was what I couldn’t share.
I keep reading your looping, cursive script, until the words are indelible inside me: “I never knew real happiness until you.
I hope the coffee is good and strong and the croissants fresh and that the weather is still sunny.
So here is the thing about being involved in a catastrophic, life-changing event. You think it’s just the catastrophic life-changing event that you’re going to have to deal with: the flashbacks, the sleepless nights, the endless running over events in your head, asking yourself if you had done the right thing, said the things you should have said, whether you could have changed things, had you done it even a degree differently.