Kindle Notes & Highlights
THE BUCHANANS’ PULL WAS AS natural and strong as the moon on the tides, and when I was with them I was happy in the warmth of their reflected light.
She was as fragile and full of life as a flute of champagne teetering on the edge of a table. He was strong enough to be the man he was born to be, but maybe not the one he would have chosen to become.
I knew what I was doing. I was becoming that girl, the one who drops all her old friends when a new, exciting one comes around. I knew what I was doing and I couldn’t help myself. I didn’t want to.
“Most of the time I feel like I’m muddling my way through.” I wove my right hand through the wind, catching and falling, spreading my fingers to feel every bit of it. “I mean I might know, but that doesn’t mean I’m certain. Does that make sense?”
She was beautiful anyway, but on a horse she looked like she was meant to have wings.
“She’s always been so good with animals. As a little girl, she was forever picking up creatures and trying to rehabilitate them.
The air was swollen with music, shouting, and something I could not quite place—a feeling of happiness, but happiness with an edge, a sense of joy that was all the more meaningful because it was so fleeting.
It’s only in hindsight that we can point, as easily as finding a town on a map, to the moments that shaped us—the moments when choices between yeses and noes determined the people we became.
Non est vivere sed valere vita est (Life is more than just being alive)
He made me tongue-tied and sloppy and nervous and want what was not mine to have.
I knew that searching for truths in the faces in old photographs was like looking for love in a painting—you might see its shadows there, but it’s not the real thing.
“That Gatsby tries so hard for his dream. That he wants to be part of Daisy’s world so badly that he’ll do anything. He believes in her long after he shouldn’t. His hope is beautiful. It’s what ends up killing him, but it’s still beautiful.”
Happiness makes us all fools. Fools and so much more.
No matter how many times he ended our phone calls with “See you tonight,” no matter how many little gifts he sent—a set of paints, an art magazine, flowers, and more flowers—or how many times he signed an email “Can’t wait to see you,” I didn’t fully trust he would really be there. I didn’t trust it until I could touch him, and once I touched him, I couldn’t take my hands off him.
“Getting your heart broken isn’t the worst thing in the world. But not taking that risk? That’s just pathetic.”
I would have promised her the moon, if it had been mine to give.
I felt part of a world that was so large and so strange I could never understand it, and that was okay. I was happy to give myself up to it.
Before that night, I didn’t grasp that the shadows that sometimes crossed her face weren’t momentary clouds passing in front of the sun. Her deep silences were more than daydreams. And her habit of standing with her arms wrapped around her ribs was her way of holding herself together.
She couldn’t hold so much life, light, and joy without also containing their opposites.
Non est ad astra mollis e terris via (There is no easy way from the earth to the stars) —Seneca the Younger
“I can’t. Sebastian, you know I can’t. I need to walk away now or I’ll never go. You’re going to be great. Maybe even greater than Boom. But I need to figure out who I am when I’m not here. What’s real. I thought I knew, but I think . . . I think I lost track somewhere.”
They were perfect. They were flawed. They were scarred and beautiful. They were too familiar with death and clung to life by clinging to one another. The Great Buchanans were only human, after all.
This is not something anyone can teach you. Heartbreak you must learn on your own.
I knew too much. So she pushed me away. It was how she stayed whole. It was how she survived. I could not hate her for that—for wanting to survive. I could not hate her for anything.
Walking among tombs, paintings, and strangers like a ghost was oddly comforting. I could be no one. I could be someone. I was just a girl with sad eyes, a sketchbook, and an oversized bag drifting among ordinary people.
Instead of the piercing sensation in my chest I used to suffer at just the thought of him, I feel only the vibration of a once-broken bone that has long ago healed.
I wish for the same thing I’ve hoped for since the beginning. I wish for a life so brave, so unpredictable, so full of unexpected joys and unforgettable love that no box could possibly contain all my memories. Such a life won’t be perfect. It’ll be something better. It’ll be my own paradise.
