Being this close to her silence is like my heart breaking all over the place. I can feel it, like it’s pulling me down into a bottomless pit, like it’s calling for me to just fall and fall and fall.
In a place of all this beauty and potential... we just repeat the same mistakes. Do we hate paradise so much we have to be sure it becomes a trash heap?
Give him numbers, he’s great. Give him words and sentences to put together and his forehead creases down so you can see exactly what he’ll look like when he’s eighty.
A bully with charisma and top marks is still a bully.
They’re weak and strong and they make mistakes, like anyone, like he has. And love and care have all kinds of different faces, and within them, there’s room for understanding, and for forgiveness, and for more. More and more and more. Sometimes.
Doesn’t a part of you think you’re making a big deal out of not very much? That if you were somehow not so weak, you could be happy and free just like everyone else?
Kindness is the most important thing of all. Pity is an insult. Kindness is a miracle.
I’d keep my eyes open, remember who I was, and go in swinging.
And there. The power of a word. The power of one word. That’s where it all changes.
Tread carefully, Marty. I mean it. The world has completely changed around you while you weren’t looking.
People with really stiff morals are easier to tip over.
If you can’t pray it away, it’s not a real problem.
I thought I had more. I thought Gudmund was my more. It didn’t matter how crap everything else was. The stuff with Owen, The stuff with my parents, even later with the stuff at school. I could live with all of that, because I had him. He was mine and no one else’s. We lived in this private world, that no one else knew about and no one else ever lived in.
I just want the world to make sense now and then, is that so wrong?
He survives, does our Todd.
I don’t want you to go,” he said, the tears dropping from his eyes, slowly at first, then spilling like a river. “I know, my love,” his mother said in her heavy voice. “I know.
Conor blinked. Then blinked again. “You’re going to tell me stories?” Indeed, the monster said. “Well–” Conor looked around in disbelief. “How is that a nightmare?” Stories are the wildest things of all, the monster rumbled. Stories chase and bite and hunt.
But I begin to wonder if doubt is better than the wrong knowledge.
They’re your parents. They’re meant to love you because. Never in spite.
You imagine the devil, you make the devil.