words to live by

My current haphazard remedy to insomnia.
My favorite quotes from some of my favorite books.
So let's do this...


- I’d long ago learned not to be picky in farewells. They weren’t guaranteed or promised. You were lucky, more than blessed, if you got a goodbye at all.

-I was always That Girl. The girl with the dead parent. Everyone knew. It was always out in the open, written on my face. But the fact that I was angry and scared, that was my secret to keep. They didn’t get to have that, too. It was all mine.

- Shoulda, coulda, woulda. It’s so easy in the past tense.

- Who knew three dots could make such a difference? Like everything else, a love or a wish or whatever, it was all in the way you read it.

- But that was the problem with having the answers. It was only after you gave them that you realized they sometimes weren’t what people wanted to hear.

-I can't count the number of times Wes has tried to secretly fix the hole in the driveway. I just think that some things are meant to be broken. Imperfect. Chaotic. It’s the universe’s way of providing contrast, you know? There have to be a few holes in the road. It’s how life is.

- There’s an entirely different feel to quiet when you’re with someone else, and at any moment it could be broken. Like the difference between a pause and an ending.

- I’d tried to hold myself apart, showing only what I wanted, doling out bits and pieces of who I was. But that only works for so long. Eventually, even the smallest fragments can’t help but make a whole.

- For any one of us our forever could end in an hour, or a hundred years from now. You can never know for sure, so you’d better make every second count.• The truth is, nothing is guaranteed. So don’t be afraid. Be alive.

- Grief can be a burden, but also an anchor. You get used to the weight, to how it holds you to a place.

- That was the thing. You just never knew. Forever was so many different things. It was always changing, it was what everything was really all about. It was twenty minutes, or a hundred years, or just this instant, or any instant I wished would last and last. But there was only one truth about forever that really mattered, and that was this: it was happening. Right then, as I ran with Wes into that bright sun, and every moment afterwards. Now. Now. Now.

- When I got to my own face, I found myself staring at it, so bright with dark all around it, like it was someone I didn't recognize. Like a word on a page that you've printed and read a million times, that suddenly looks strange or wrong, foreign, and you feel scared for a second, like you've lost something, even if you're not sure what it is.

- All you could do was take on as much weight as you can bear. And if you're lucky, there's someone close enough by to shoulder the rest.

- I wasn't used to seeing her this way. She had always been the stronger, the livelier, the braver. The girl who punched out Missy Lassiter, the meanest, most fiendish of the pink-bike girls that first summer she moved in, on a day when they surrounded us and tried to make us cry. The girl who kept a house, and her mother, up and running since she was five, now playing mother to a thirty-five-year-old child. The girl who had kept the world from swallowing me whole... Because life is an ugly, awful place to not have a best friend.

- When I pictured myself, it was always like just an outline in a coloring book, with the inside not yet completed.