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affects your mind so that you cannot think clearly, or make rational decisions about your own well-being.
The deadliest of all deadly things: It kills you both when you have it and when you don’t.
Hearts are fragile things. That’s why you have to be so careful.
examination table, a stinging, antiseptic smell.
I take
Step on a crack, you’ll break your mama’s back. Step on a stone, you’ll end up all alone. Step on a stick, you’re bound to get the Sick. Watch where you tread, you’ll bring out all the dead. —A common children’s playground chant, usually accompanied by jumping rope or clapping
It’s so strange how life works: You want something and you wait and wait and feel like it’s taking forever to come. Then it happens and it’s over and all you want to do is curl back up in that moment before things changed.
“The cured, incapable of strong desire, are thus rid of both remembered and future pain” (“After the Procedure,” The Safety, Health, and Happiness Handbook, p. 132).
Mama, Mama, help me get home I’m out in the woods, I am out on my own. I found me a werewolf, a nasty old mutt It showed me its teeth and went straight for my gut. Mama, Mama, help me get home I’m out in the woods, I am out on my own. I was stopped by a vampire, a rotting old wreck It showed me its teeth, and went straight for my neck. Mama, Mama, put me to bed I won’t make it home, I’m already half-dead. I met an Invalid, and fell for his art He showed me his smile, and went straight for my heart.
onto
I understood that all the happiest moments of my childhood were a lie. They were wrong and unsafe and illegal. They were freakish. My mother was freakish, and I’d probably inherited the freakishness from her.
OF PORTLAND,
Most things, even the greatest movements on earth, have their beginnings in something small.
Sometimes I feel like if you just watch things, just sit still and let the world exist in front of you—sometimes I swear that just for a second time freezes and the world pauses in its tilt. Just for a second. And if you somehow found a way to live in that second, then you would live forever.
The past is nothing but a weight. It will build inside of you like a stone.
If you hear the past speaking to you, feel it tugging at your back and running its fingers up your spine, the best thing to do—the only thing—is run.
four names and statistics—age, scores, interests,
It will kill me, it will kill me, it will kill me. And I don’t care.
Love:
That’s what it is: an edge; a razor. It draws up through the center of your life, cutting everything in two. Before and after. The rest of the world falls away on either side. Before and after—and during, a moment no bigger or longer than an edge.
Love, the deadliest of all deadly things: It kills you both when you have it and when you don’t. But that isn’t it, exactly. The condemner and the condemned. The executioner; the blade; the last-minute reprieve; the gasping breath and the rolling sky above you and the thank you, thank you, thank you, God. Love: It will kill you and save you, both.
every way. But I have a secret. You can build walls all the way to the sky and I will find a way to fly above them. You can try to pin me down with a hundred thousand arms, but I will find a way to resist.
