More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
“The end came quickly, and there wasn’t any pain.”
Sometimes, the father whispers it to the mother. Sometimes, the mother to the father. From the top of the stairs, Lucy hears it all and says nothing.
“In the end, the end of a life only matters to friends, family, and other folks you used to know,” the pug whimpers miserably. “For everyone else, it’s just another end.”
‘Everyone loves you when you’re dead: once you’re dead, you’re made for life.’
It talks about how human existence is like a circle and a line at the same time. It is a circle, because everything that was old would be new and everything that was new becomes old. It is a line because the circle stretches out indefinitely, infinitely even. People die. People are born. People die again. Each birth and death is a little circle, and the sum of all those little circles is a life and a line.
“that dying is just another part of living, Elizabeth. In time, you may even come to see your death as a birth. Just think of it as Elizabeth Hall: The Sequel.”
If your last words are somehow meant to encapsulate your entire existence, Liz finds um strangely appropriate.
Um means nothing. Um is what you say while you’re thinking of what you’ll really say. Um suggests someone interrupted before they’d begun. Um is a fifteen-year-old girl who gets hit by a taxicab in front of a mall on the way to help pick out a prom dress for a prom she isn’t even going to, for God’s sake. Um.
Did you know that there are over three hundred words for love in Canine?”
Even when the body is well, you still find that the mind … Well, the mind has a mind of its own.”
“Dead,” Aldous says, “is little more than a state of mind. Many people on Earth spend their whole lives dead, but you’re probably too young to understand what I mean.”
People, you’ll find, aren’t usually all good or all bad. Sometimes they’re a little bit good and a whole lot bad. And sometimes, they’re mostly good with a dash of bad. And most of us, well, we fall in the middle somewhere.”
After all, the only way to absolutely ensure things will go badly is to be late.
“Hope you don’t mind dog hair, Liz.” “Nah, it’s just a little present dogs like to leave behind.”
think you’re already on an adventure, and you don’t even know it,”
“That doesn’t just happen to people in Elsewhere, Liz,” says Owen. “Even on Earth, it’s difficult to ever go back to the same places or people. You turn away, even for a moment, and when you turn back around, everything’s changed.”
Why do two people ever fall in love? It’s a mystery.
‘The course of true love never did run smooth,’”
A life is a good story,
There will be other lives. There will be other lives for nervous boys with sweaty palms, for bittersweet fumblings in the backseats of cars, for caps and gowns in royal blue and crimson, for mothers clasping pretty pearl necklaces around daughters’ unlined necks, for your full name read aloud in an auditorium, for brand-new suitcases transporting you to strange new people in strange new lands. And there will be other lives for unpaid debts, for one-night stands, for Prague and for Paris, for painful shoes with pointy toes, for indecisions and revisions. And there will be other lives for
...more
How we wish we could live them concurrently instead of one by one by one.
A human’s life is a beautiful mess.
life isn’t measured in hours and minutes. It’s the quality, not the length.
“We never know what will happen,” Betty says, “but I believe good things happen every day. I believe good things happen even when bad things happen. And I believe on a happy day like today, we can still feel a little sad. And that’s life, isn’t it?”
