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The most dangerous sicknesses are those that make us believe we are well. —Proverb 42, The Book of Shhh
I don’t like to think that I’m still walking around with the disease running through my blood. Sometimes I swear I can feel it writhing in my veins like something spoiled, like sour milk.
The deadliest of all deadly things: It kills you both when you have it and when you don’
We must be constantly on guard against the Disease; the health of our nation, our people, our families, and our minds depends on constant vigilance. —“Basic Health Measures,” The Safety, Health, and Happiness Handbook, 12th edition
Hearts are fragile things. That’s why you have to be so careful.
“You can’t be really happy unless you’re unhappy sometimes. You know that, right?”
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, 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.
Most things, even the greatest movements on earth, have their beginnings in something small.
The second time my world exploded, it was also because of a word. A word that worked its way out of my throat and danced onto and out of my lips before I could think about it, or stop it.
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.
I know the past will drag you backward and down, have you snatching at whispers of wind and the gibberish of trees rubbing together, trying to decipher some code, trying to piece together what was broken. It’s hopeless. The past is nothing but a weight. It will build inside of you like a stone.
Human beings, in their natural state, are unpredictable, erratic, and unhappy. It is only once their animal instincts are controlled that they can be responsible, dependable, and content. —The Book of Shhh, p. 31
I know that life isn’t life if you just float through it. I know that the whole point—the only point—is to find the things that matter, and hold on to them, and fight for them, and refuse to let them go.
Love: It will kill you and save you, both.
You have to understand. I am no one special. I am just a single girl. I am five feet two inches tall and I am in-between in every way.
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.
And there are many of us out there, more than you think. People who refuse to stop believing. People who refuse to come to earth. People who love in a world without walls, people who love into...
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