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but often she felt like the real Miles was the boy weeping in darkness, giving off some kind of strange dream-light, not this perfect one who was more like a boarder than a brother.
He only found himself, his real self, in novels, not even in the stories and characters, but in the sentences, the lone words.
and kissed him until his mind reconfigured into a bonfire.
he just thought he was one of the sad solitary people. Like if he were in a Victorian novel, he’d be the melancholic who constantly fainted and took to her bed.)
deep garnet color, hints of cherries, roses, has you talking to the moon and the moon talking right back, pairs well with heartbreak, makes you feel so in love you might ask strangers to marry.
He’d get a similar feeling sometimes when reading became more like breathing and he knew he’d left real life and his soul had transferred from his body into the story.
Sehnsucht. They say it doesn’t translate well to English but the closest we get is: inconsolable longing.”
Dizzy was plain on the outside, like Wynton was, but unlike him, she was a geode, had a sparkling kingdom of glory within. He had a rodent farm inside.
I always pray my own sadness won’t make me disappear,
I never want Dizzy to feel like that, like the world is made of ashes. Like she’s a shadow that has been detached from its person. I never want her to know that a life is an abandoned unfinished story.
There’s an invisible artery joining the hearts of mothers and daughters through which pain is transferred from one generation to the next. Maybe it’s the same for fathers and sons, I wouldn’t know. But I don’t have those words then, so I say the ones I do have again: “We’re the same, Mom.”
She didn’t understand the preoccupation with leaving home, where it was safe and everyone you loved was within earshot.
Life really becomes an accumulation of losses,
She didn’t know what people were supposed to do with the leftover love that no one wanted anymore.
He was such a rough draft, had no idea what parts of himself would make it, what crap parts would be cut.
He was the anti–Alonso Fall. He was the object of a preposition, never the subject of the sentence that was his life.
I think it’s possible to live our lives without believing in destiny, without feeling it at work in the
choices we make, or the choices that are made for us. But it feels impossible to tell the story of our lives without it. Stories give our lives structure, and that structure is destiny.
Desiderium, n. an ardent desire for something lost.
His father and Cassidy seemed to be made of the same stuff he was, people who read like others breathed.
I get tattooed on my arm the quote everyone thinks is by Walt Whitman but is just a paraphrase of a quote by him: We were together, I forget the rest.
It’s impossible to relate to the young woman who did what I did, but our yesterdays follow us around forever.
Sorry is the shamble of a house I live in. I know every desperate inch.
A glisk, I think, tattooed on my wrist, maybe my favorite word of all. Because, ultimately and ideally, isn’t that what life is: a fleeting glance at a glittering sight.
Metanoia, n. a transformative change of heart.
I do believe now that when the world tips over, joy spills out with all the sorrow.
