The beautiful part of writing is that you don’t have to get it right the first time, unlike, say, a brain surgeon.
It’s amazing that the heart makes no noise when it cracks.
Go get your bus, square boy.
He closed the locker quickly so no one would see the damage. For some reason, he felt ashamed.
I had my bully, and it was excruciating. Not only the bully, but the intimidation I felt.
Everybody sins, Francis. The terrible thing is that we love our sins. We love the thing that makes us evil.
A new sickness invaded Jerry, the sickness of knowing what he had become, another animal, another beast, another violent person in a violent world, inflicting damage, not disturbing the universe but damaging it.
And he did see – that life was rotten, that there were no heroes, really, and that you couldn’t trust anybody, not even yourself.
People throw the word love around like confetti when they actually mean affection.
The possibility that hope comes out of hopelessness and that the opposite of things carry the seeds of birth – love out of hate, good out of evil. Didn’t flowers grow out of dirt?
I have lived a thousand lives lost within the pages of a book.
He was swept with a sadness, a sadness deep and penetrating, leaving him desolate like someone washed up on a beach, a lone survivor in a world full of strangers.
There are moments that stop the heart, that catch the breath, that halt the beat of blood in your veins, and you are suspended in time, held between life and death, and you wait for something to bring you back again.
You could reason with someone who was halfway educated and appeal to his intelligence, but I felt helpless in the face of utter stupidity.
It doesn’t matter how big the body, it’s what you do with it.
Do I dare disturb the universe? Yes, I do, I do. I think. Jerry suddenly understood the poster – the solitary man on the beach standing upright and alone and unafraid, poised at the moment of making himself heard and known in the world, the universe.
They don’t actually want you to do your own thing, not unless it’s their thing too.
It would be nice to avoid the world, to leave it and all its threats and unhappiness. Not to die or anything like that, but to find a place of solitude and solace.
He hated to think of his own life stretching ahead of him that way, a long succession of days and nights that were fine – not good, not bad, not great, not lousy, not exciting, not anything.