More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
THE LOVE OF my life wants to die.
reasons are just poor attempts at justifying misfortune. They give you an illusion of why, but why is a loud question, and death is quiet.
if you pretend for too long, reality reminds
you one way or another that it doesn’t like being insulted.
“I wish I could keep pretending with you.”
death decided to give him back to me, over and over again.
“Remember me,” he says. “Remember that just because the stars fell doesn’t mean they weren’t worth wishing on.”
death takes his hand instead.
You. My light, my love, my reason. “You’ll die.”
My stars are falling. And I can’t save them.
WHEN HE DIED, I became someone else.
Disease is greedy. It takes pieces of you until you no longer recognize yourself,
“Love is hard to walk away from, even if it hurts.”
“Try walking away from someone who knows you so well they ruin you. You’ll find yourself wondering how you could ever love anyone else.
He lives in my memory now.
The night isn’t the enemy I make it out to be. It’s the natural state of things when your sun burns out.
Does Hikari know she has suns in her eyes?
“I’m not shy—I don’t think. I’m just bad at existing.” “What does that mean?” “It’s just—I guess this body never felt like mine.”
every time I look at her, my thoughts no longer begin or end.
“I’m from here,” I say. “The city?” “The hospital.”
What do you have? Who is your killer? It’s a different way of asking, but it’s the same question.
people don’t know what to say to someone they think is dying.
They create distance without even meaning to because distance is comfortable.
“I don’t believe in reasons.”
“There’s nothing more human than sin,”
Apathy is a symptom of repetition.
Look into a person and see someone you used to know and ask yourself if you believe in reincarnation. If you believe a soul is never truly dead, only passed on to another body, another mind, another life, another reality. If you do, I must ask, what do you think makes someone real?
He’s dead. He’s a ghost, and so is what we shared, so I don’t compare the two.
the more she’ll come to realize the truths only our killers can teach her: No matter what you steal, the nights are long, and one day is as much an illusion as reason.
Humans have a knack for self-destruction. Only those of us who love broken things will ever know why.
Destruction is addictive, he writes. The more I am, the less I want to be. The less I am, the lesser I want to become.
Secrets make people vulnerable. Vulnerability is an isolating force. It pushes people away.
Forgetting is an essential part of grief.
Paper is my heart. Pens are my veins. They return words I stole, blood to paint a scene.
It’s difficult to ignore what you love, even when its existence is as conditional as what you hate.
Vulnerability craves isolation. Desperation weeps in it.
“He loves me because he has to,” Neo cries. “That’s worse than hating someone.
“I’d rather be nothing than hate myself.”
Love and hate aren’t interchangeable. They don’t mean the same thing, but they are not opposites.
Love gives people the power to be treacherous. Being hurt by someone you share such a thing with is draining—a needle under the skin or a knife in the rib. Hate is a choice. Love is not. There’s nothing so out of our control as that.
“Have you ever been in love?”
Tonight, his heart is mine to protect.
“Stars aren’t eternal. They should burn and shine with everything they have while they can,”
“Why does anyone steal anything?” “To sin?” “To be human?”
“How do you kill time, disease, and death?” Hikari asks. “You steal what they stole.” “Cigarettes and beer?” “Moments,” I correct. “Childhoods. Lives.”
“The dead do not haunt, no matter how much you beg them to.”
“But sometimes parents love the idea of their child more than the person they are.”
“That kind of love is suffocating.”
Emotions and I don’t have the best relationship. It’s a distant, bitter affair—a divorce. Emotions are disgusted by me. They’re a gust of wind on the other side of that ledge, and
Emotions are with the ghosts I buried, husks of what they were, hollow hauntings. But who knows? Maybe Shakespeare can dig them up.
