I wanted to be free to write the way I wanted to write, and my impression of Christian publishing, at least in fiction, was that there wasn’t room for what I wanted to write.
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.
Your greatest creation is your creative life. It’s all in your hands.
There are so many pieces to grief. Sad pieces, angry pieces, guilty pieces, pieces of regret, and pieces that are a certain kind of pain that doesn’t even have a word.
You don’t get anything without giving up something.
I can be human to strangers and coworkers, just not to the people who actually care about me.
This was why Mom had told me to keep an eye on her. As tough as Dixie was, when it came to Dad she was a regular girl who wanted her father to love her. So.
You used to not give a damn about anything, but that was because you were brave, not cynical. You used to have so much courage.
Is that the destiny of all friendships, no matter how good they are? To die out or fade away? To end?
You have to dig down and find some part of you that doesn’t care what people think, doesn’t care if it’s hard, doesn’t care if it hurts, doesn’t care if you have to momentarily experience humiliation, uncertainty, fear.
We had this time. We had this little bit of time together for being honest. It felt sharp and finite, like it could end any second without warning. “I know you want me to be different than I am,” I said. “But you could have helped me be more of what you wanted by actually talking to me. Telling me things.
And I’ll dream about living there one day myself, about boats and bicycles and water, and a dog running next to me on the road, in the green, green afternoon light.
I’d been in bed for an hour without falling asleep, going over my day and all the ways I had been weird at school.