I was like a chocolate in a box, looking well behaved and perfect in place, all the while harboring a secret center.
And if you could make a choice, then why not pick happiness?
If your life truths have to be protected like some people keep their couches in plastic then ciao. have a nice life. if we bump into eachoter at Target, i’m the one buying the sour gummy worms and thats all you need to know about me.
Yeah. When you want what’s real and you try to find that in high school, you might as well be looking for a mossy rock beside a babbling brook on the corner of Sixth and Pine in downtown Seattle.
A drop of poison on that gathering snow. That moment in the fairy tale when we know what just happened but the princess doesn’t.
Sometimes you can cattle rope your heart and sometimes you can’t, is all.
Becoming a YA author was actually a very lucky accident. When I wrote the Queen of Everything, I thought it was a book for adults.
Like all kids with divorced parents, I have an abundance of holidays.
Summer, after all, is a time when wonderful things can happen to quiet people.
Accents are funny in that they have this odd draw for us, yet we forget we have one, too. No one is without an accent, but the one you’ve got seems like oatmeal to their caviar.
This is not to say I don’t feel my own grief, which can hit powerfully at unexpected times. It’s just that the telling does not automatically bring on my own upset, as people assume. I deal more with their reaction than they do with mine, and so you have to choose your timing.
It’s shocking the things we call love.
So I put up with bad behavior in the name of loving the way I thought you were supposed to love.
I didn’t walk over and talk to him, though, not then. If I needed the time for a tree branch to become just a tree branch again and the wind to become just the wind, then a boy, most of all, needed some time to be only a boy.
Because words were hills and valleys you traveled, so lovely sometimes that they hurt your eyes.
The most insane things can become normal if you have them around you long enough. A mind can’t seem to hold anything too crazy for too long without finding a way to make it seem normal.
Beaches, music, and car rides – they could all bring on a sudden bout of deep, dreamy thoughts.
Fear was the biggest bullshitter, he’d said. But sometimes, too, fear told the truth.
Cool superiority as a mask for overflowing insecurity.
I put the guitar back in the case. I can’t even look at it anymore. Instead, I want to make brownies. I want an end result there’s a recipe for. I want to combine eggs and water and oil and chocolate and flour and sugar and vanilla and get something fulfilling.
All of us create our own versions of an event, of our lives, even, not because were liars, necessarily, but because we can only see and understand the truth from our own viewpoint, and a shifting viewpoint at that.