You forget what it feels like to have fallen apart once you've pieced yourself back together, what the scars feel like once they've healed. You know, vaguely, where they were, how the fresh cuts had stung, but you can't run your finger over the surface anymore and say, 'Here. Here's where you hurt me.' The pain will eventually dull. But not yet.
Remember Maya: the things we respond to at twenty are not necessarily the same things we will respond to at forty and vice versa. This is true in books and also in life.
You don‘t always get to prepare, to say your goodbyes. The end sometimes arrives without warning. It swings for you and all you can do is accept the beating.
“I squat there and think about how you get trained early on as a woman to perceive how others are perceiving you, at the great expense of what you yourself are feeling about them.”
[The salesclerk] sold pills invented to quench thirst. Swallow one a week and you no longer feel any need to drink.
“Why do you sell these pills?”
“They save so much time,” the salesclerk said. “Experts have calculated that you can save 53 minutes a week.”
“And what do you do with those 53 minutes?”
“Whatever you like.”
“If I had 53 minutes to spend as I liked,” the little prince said to himself, “I‘d walk very slowly toward a water fountain…”
“Is something really large wrong with you, Virgil, or just something small, do you think?”
“And when did he tell you this?” Ike asked.
“Right after I drove my truck through his house and tried to brain him with a baseball bat full of nails,” Buddy Lee said.
“Somehow it had become all of our faults, except his.”
“I can describe to you how fear feels, but not courage. Courage is not an emotion. It‘s a virtue. You don‘t feel brave.”
“He speaks with the enthusiasm of a child again, but I can detect an undertone of desperation. I know him, and what he is really saying is this: this is how the story must end; our hearts can bear no more loss.”
“In a good year, there might be two or three of them – the outcasts and weirdos, the cellists and geniuses and acne-ridden tuba players, the poets, the boys whose asthma precluded a high school football career and the girls who hadn‘t learned to hide their smarts. Stories save lives, Corrine said to those students. To the rest of them she said, I‘ll wake you when it‘s over.”
“He faced the house, closed his eyes, and he put his hand on the rolled-up cuff of Asher‘s shirt. He wanted to bathe in it for five seconds, the future he might be having if it weren‘t for everything.”
“In the painting, Willem‘s torso is directed toward the viewer, but his face is turned to the right so that he is almost in profile, and he‘s leaning toward something or someone and smiling. And because he knows Willem‘s smiles, he knows Willem has been captured looking at something he loves and he knows Willem in that instant was happy.”
what terrifies me most is how we
foam at the mouth with envy
when others succeed
but sigh in relief
when they are failing
our struggle to
celebrate each other is
what‘s proven most difficult
in being human
She is still crying. Wolfheart as well. But they do what they can. They construct words of forgiveness from the ruins of fighting words.
“All I will say is that you show up for your friends on their hardest days. And you hold their hand through the roughest parts. Life is about who is holding your hand and, I think, whose hand you commit to holding.”
“Why did your game upset him?” asked Daphne while she and Haris watched the two head toward the elevator.
“I wouldn‘t let him cheat,” said Haris.
“You wouldn‘t let him cheat, or you wouldn‘t let him win?”
“Letting him win is cheating.”
But just as the last of the attendees was disappearing through the doors, a taxi pulled to the curb, the door flung open, and a woman in red dashed up the stairs with the hem of her dress in her hands.
Leaning forward, Nina cupped her palms against the glass and squinted.
“If only I were there and she were here,” she sighed.
And there, thought the Count, was a suitable plaint for all mankind.
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