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Before the Smorgasbord, Noah Price was just a star in my sky . . . constant, familiar, bright, and far above me.
Proximity doesn’t breed familiarity.
I know no one is perfect, that behind every façade of perfection is a writhing mess of subterfuge and secret sorrows
My grandparents are great people, but they are easily rattled. Like, if the grocery store sells out of some frozen pizza or soup they advertise in the circular, and they’ve gone to the store just for that, they’ll stand there debating their next move for a half an hour.
I knew it was beautiful, but knowing something is beautiful and caring about it are two very different things, and I didn’t care.
She did this amazing thing where she included me in the conversation and ignored me at the same time.
There is nothing about a bad situation that fourteen hyper cheerleaders can’t worsen.
Being sixteen means you have to be a genius conversational editor.
Something about me has always liked the drama and inconvenience of bad weather. The worse the better, really.
“Guy walks into a bar. Bartender says, ‘What’ll ya have?’ And the guy says, ‘Whaddya got?’ And the bartender says, ‘I don’t know what I got, but I know what you got: Stage IV melanoma.’”
Cheesy waffles, I was thinking, taste like love without the fear of love’s dissolution,
It’s such a disaster, whenever, in the course of human relationships, someone begins to chisel away at the wall of separation between friendship and kissing. Breaking down that wall is the kind of story that might have a happy middle—oh, look, we broke down this wall, I’m going to look at you like a girl and you’re going to look at me like a boy and we’re going to play a fun game called Can I Put My Hand There What About There What About There. And sometimes that happy middle looks so great that you can convince yourself that it’s not the middle but will last forever.
once you think a thought, it is extremely difficult to unthink it.
“I always had this idea that you should never give up a happy middle in the hopes of a happy ending, because there is no such thing as a happy ending. Do you know what I mean? There is so much to lose.”
Prickles shot up and down my spine, because any sentence that combined “I love you” and “but” could not be good.
And then I stopped. I cut that whiny voice off midsentence, because I was sick of it, and it wasn’t doing me any good, and anyway, shouldn’t I have some say over the endless thoughts running through my head? In my brain—and in my heart—I experienced a sudden absence of static. Wow. I could get used to that.