Elsewhere

by Gabrielle Zevin

“I was a drug addict. I didn’t want to die.”

an avocation is basically like a job, except you are actually supposed to like doing it.

Liz finds telling lies easy now that she’s started. The only problem (as many before Liz have discovered) is that she has to keep telling more and more of them.

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.”

“The thing about Shakespeare is you can only read him if someone is making you,”

If no one knows you’re alive, no one you love, you may as well be dead,

I know he’s a good person. And he said he was sorry. And I love him. And when you love a person, you have to forgive him sometimes. And that’s what I think.”

Oh, there are so many lives. How we wish we could live them concurrently instead of one by one by one. We could select the best pieces of each, stringing them together like a strand of pearls. But that’s not how it works. A human’s life is a beautiful mess.

“A life isn’t measured in hours and minutes. It’s the quality, not the length.

There was a time Liz was afraid that she would forget things, but by the time she truly began to forget, she forgot to be afraid to forget.