My first job is to write the characters as full and authentic people as well as I can.
I looked at my hand resting on the shelf of the prop cabinet, thinking of the scars that were there whether anyone could see them or not.
Sometimes rescue comes to you. It just shows up, and you do nothing. Maybe you deserve it, maybe you don’t. But be ready, when it comes, to decide if you will take the outstretched hand and let it pull you ashore.
You were never what I wanted to forget.
Life needed a fast forward button. Because there were days you just don’t want to live through, not again, but they kept coming around and you were powerless to stop time or speed it up or do anything to keep from having to face it.
I tried his cell over and over but he never answered. Then I’d call just to hear his voice on the outgoing message, until eventually that was gone too.
The importance of our connection, what it meant to find each other again, the way it made what happened to us and between us not be a waste, not be for nothing. He would know, he had to know, that not saying good-bye would be the worst end of all.
In a way, “failure” is just another word for “the journey,” for not being there yet but on the way. It’s the road we walk on to get wherever it is we’re trying to go.
No one measures a life in weeks and days. You measure life in years and by the things that happen to you.
Sometimes you want to hear your own mother’s voice.
Sometimes you should have something you don’t need but that you want.
Some people come into your life and leave a mark.
Sitting and waiting for something to happen was the worst kind of torture.
Katy skipped over, her low-rise jeans threatening to fall off her skinny hips. With some girls, that was a sexy look. With Katy, it made you nervous.
It makes me think of Lazarus. He must have had those shadows after his miracle. You don’t spend time in the tomb without it changing you, and everyone who was waiting for you to come out.
I wonder how you’re supposed to know the exact moment when there’s no more hope.
I don’t want these memories to become slippery, to just disappear into the thin air of life the way most things seem to. I want them to stick – even the bad ones – so I repeat them often.
Ethan couldn’t possibly understand it, what Cameron and I meant to each other and how different it was from anything like a romance or a crush.
It’s like a Venn diagram of tragedy.
Your greatest creation is your creative life. It’s all in your hands. Rejection can’t take it away; reviews can’t take it away. The life you create for yourself as an artist, may be the only thing that’s really yours. Create a life you can center yourself in calmly as you wait for your work to grow.
I was a ‘learn by doing’ writer – I never took any formal writing classes. So it took a long time to figure things out and find my voice.