I looked out at the world around me and no longer saw nuance. I saw nothing but the potential for pain and the subsequent need to protect myself, constantly.
Words, will live as long as people can remember them.
Love, it turned out, could both hurt and heal.
This,” he says, touching the air between us, “is an exception to a very hard rule.
Studies have shown that thinking and wondering lead to thoughtful decision-making. It’s an epidemic.
But now Warner’s eyes are moving, studying me. He looks at me with such intensity I wonder if he’s even aware he’s doing it. I wonder if he knows that when he looks at me like that I can feel it as acutely as if his bare skin were pressed against my own, that it does things to me when he looks at me like that and it makes me crazy.
I’m trying to focus, telling myself these are just empty words, but I’m lying. Because somehow, just reading these words is too much; and the thought of her in pain is causing me an unbearable amount of agony.
I was so raw from repeated exposure to cruelty that now even the most minor abrasions left a mark.
The world tried to crush you,” I say, gently now, “and you refused to be shattered.
I have a pretty spectacular face.
It’s strange. How hollow i feel. Like there might be echoes inside of me. Like I’m one of those chocolate rabbits they used to sell around Easter, the ones that were nothing more than a sweet shell encapsulating a world of nothing. I’m like that. I encapsulate a world of nothing.
I don’t have the time, the energy, or the interest to deal with your problems.
It’s not the pain that’s unendurable. It’s the hopelessness. It’s the hopelessness that makes you reckless.
She felt most comfortable in nature, where things weren’t required to look like the other in order to live together peacefully.
The morning arrived the way Alice imagined a whisper would: in tendrils of gray and threads of gold, quietly, quietly. The sky was illuminated with great care and deliberation, and she leaned back to watch it bloom.
Do you know how much I love you?” I say. “I love – loved you so much. So much.
I had never, ever touched someone and felt like this: like I was holding electricity inside of me.
The reason he had to keep wiping their memories was because it didn’t matter how many times he reset the story or remade the introductions – Aaron always fell in love with her. Every time.
His eyes darken, deaden, all of a sudden. He looks toward the wall. “Don’t do that,” he says. “Don’t ask me questions you already know the answers to. Twice I’ve laid myself bare for you and all it’s gotten me was a bullet wound and a broken heart. Don’t torture me,” he says, meeting my eyes again. “It’s a cruel thing to do, even to someone like me.
Try again,” he says slowly. “Stay calm. Have faith in yourself. If you don’t believe you can do it,” he says, “you won’t.