When you predict the future, when you do so strongly and you cling to it, how much of that future do you then cause to happen?
Little girls aren’t naturally lost,” Karen said, frowning as she scanned saucepans. “Someone makes them that way.
You told me, just now, just today, that you’d rather be dead than have to go through this much longer. I take that seriously. I don’t think your suffering is fake. I don’t think these feelings about wanting it to end are fake. I don’t think your self-hatred is fake. So why do you think it’s fake?
Maybe there didn’t have to be any other reasons. Maybe love made you stupid. Maybe loneliness did.
The green things of this world are just wondrous, aren’t they? We work so hard to get rid of them when sometimes they’re the very thing that saves us.
It was not wrong, the monster said, It was only a thought, one of a million. It was not an action.
A feeling may or may not be true, but you still feel it.
What kind of person am I when seen by you?
There were as many truths – overlapping, stewed together – as there were tellers. The truth mattered less than the story’s life. A story forgotten died. A story remembered not only lived, but grew.
How can a parson be wrong-thinking but good-hearted? How can invisible men make themselves more lonely by being seen?
I hate myself. Almost all the time. I try not to tell anyone because I don’t want to burden them, but I feel like I’m falling farther and farther away from them. Like the well’s getting deeper and I’m running out of energy to climb it and any minute now, any second, it’s going to stop being worth even trying.
But when you choose your family, you get to choose how it is between you, too.
He’d heard once that the only people who could effectively treat the trauma of surviving an airplane crash were other survivors of airplane crashes. You could only instinctively trust someone who had been there, who had seen it firsthand.
You’re helpless to the behaviour but the effort involved is just unbelievable.
I am everything untamed and untameable! It brought Conor up close to its eye. I am this wild earth, come for you, Conor O’Malley.
You got lost on your journey somewhere.” “That’s what everyone says who never bothered to go on a journey in the first place.
Haven’t you ever felt like there has to be more? Like there’s more out there somewhere, just beyond your grasp, if you could only get to it...
No one can provide the heart it’s own peace; you have to find it yourself.
His last word had been my name. The last word he heard was me speaking his own. Did this mean anything? And if it only meant something for the two of us, did that reduce it?
This is why I came walking, to tell you this so that you may heal. You must listen. Conor swallowed again. “I’m listening.” You do not write your life with words, the monster said. You write it with actions. What you think is not important. It is only important what you do. There.