An opportunist disguised as a friend can be every bit as dangerous as an outright enemy.
And it occured to me, standing there, just breathing with her, quiet settling around us, that those might be the three most beautiful words in the English language. We have time.
I was too dazed to follow right away, because there was something new happening, a wheel inside my heart I’d never noticed before, and it was spinning so fast it made me dizzy. And the farther away she got, the faster it spun, like there was an invisible cord unreeling from it that stretched between us, and if she went too far it would snap – and kill me. I wondered if this strange, sweet pain was love.
Maybe,” she said. “Maybe. But now you’re making promises you might not be able to keep, and that’s how people in love get very badly hurt.
She had this amazing capacity to turn sadness into anger and anger into action, which meant nothing ever kept her down for long.
Early in life we recognize certain talents in ourselves, and we focus on those to the exclusion of others. It’s not that nothing else is possible, but that nothing else was nurtured.
Doubt is the pinprick in the life raft.
What a beautiful day to go to hell.
Destiny is for people in books about magical swords.
I had always known the sky was full of mysteries – but not until now had I realized how full of them the earth was.
These strange-looking people weren’t peculiars. They were nerds. We were very much in the present.
Ardet nec consumitur,” Melina said. “Burned but not destroyed.
You’re right, Dad. Dr. Golan did help me. But that doesn’t mean he has to control every aspect of my life. I mean, Jesus, you and mom might as well buy me one of those little bracelets that says, What Would Golan Do? That way I can ask myself before I do anything. Before I take a dump. How would Dr. Golan want me to take this dump? Should I bank it off the side or go straight down the middle? What would be the most psychologically beneficial dump I could take?
I felt like one of those mythical heroes who fights his way back from the underworld only to realize that the world above is every bit as damned as the one below.
You may choose to live in a world of fantasy if you like, my dear, but I am a realist.
Maybe lots of people go through life never knowing they’re peculiar.
All my life, normal people had mostly baffled me-the ridiculous ways they strove to impress one another, the mediocre goals that seemed to drive them, the banality of their dreams. The way people rejected anything that didn’t fit their narrow paradigm of acceptability, as if those who thought or acted or dressed or dreamed differently from them were a threat to their very existence.
There was something sweet about holding a tangible thing that had been touched and marked upon by someone I loved.
The easiest kind of lying is when you leave things out of a story rather than make them up.
I was the perfect automaton: blessed with ability but cursed with ignorance.