This is one of my favorite things about the Underground: the crashing of the cymbals, the screeching guitar riffs, music that moves into the blood and makes you feel hot and wild and alive.
Black is too morbid; red will set them on edge; pink is too juvenile; orange is freakish.
You have to learn that people are always listening.
Maybe this is the secret to talking to boys – maybe you just have to be angry all the time.
We should be protected from the people who will leave us in the end, from all the people who will disappear or forget us.
What I meant was, you looked happier in the pictures.
Poetry isn’t like any writing I’ve ever heard before. I don’t understand all of it, just bits of images, sentences that appear half-finished, all fluttering together like brightly colored ribbons in the wind.
Once Mo had closed the gates, he returned to his little stone hut, and his half-eaten sandwich of butter and canned sardines, and his mug of thick hot chocolate, which every night he poured carefully into a thermos labeled COFFEE.
Maybe before you die, it’s your ghosts you see.
Maybe next time, but probably not.
That’s the way I feel, at least: like there’s a real me and a reflection of me, and I have no way of telling which is which.
Here’s another thing to remember: hope keeps you alive. Even when you’re dead, it’s the only thing that keeps you alive.
And I guess that’s when it starts to hit me: the whole point is, you do what you can.
It’s Connecticut: being like the people around you is the whole point.
A room full of words that are nearly the truth but not quite, each note fluttering off the steam of its rose like a broken butterfly wing.
Things That Don’t Matter When You’ve Lived the Same Day Six Times and Died on at Least Two of Them: Lunch meats and their relative coolness.
The last laugh, the last cup of coffee, the last sunset, the last time you jump through a sprinkler, or eat an ice-cream cone, or stick your tongue out to catch a snowflake. You just don’t know.
I vowed after that day that I would be your hero too, no matter how long it took.
The whole point of growing up is learning to stay on the laughing side.
I used to think that’s what love was: knowing someone so well he was like a part of you.