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It’s strange, the things you remember from your childhood, but perhaps what you forget is even stranger. When you think about summers growing up, it feels like the sun was always shining, there’s never any wind or rain in nostalgia.
Friendship is special when you’re a teenager, you can feel in your skin when there’s something wrong.
Everyone should be allowed to be fourteen for far longer than a year.
there’s a difference between being loved and receiving love,”
Art is what we leave of ourselves in other people.
“So: she wanted to be a fish because fish are like birds, only underwater. They’re free. If you get what I mean?”
The way Ted looks at her isn’t entirely dissimilar to the way you would look at a spider on a sandwich.
also an idiot, so he suggested it should say: ‘Here lies a man who ate his vegetables but died anyway,’ ”
It’s so strange, he thinks, the way we remember things. What we try to remember and what we fight to forget.
He can still feel her on his skin, twenty-five years later.
The children of addicts always know what the time is.
Unlike Ali, the boys did everything they could to escape being noticed at that damn school. Attention was lethal, that was how you ended up being bullied and beaten.
“None of you understand. I’m not locked up in here with YOU. You’re locked up in here with ME.”
Art is coincidence,” Ted says.
“Which will hold greater rule over you? Your fear or your curiosity?”
“Heroes are made by the paths they choose.”
“If there is nothing but what we make in this world, brothers, let us make good.”
“I wanted to be able to stop time. So my mom would never lose my dad, so Joar wouldn’t get beaten by his old man, so… so I would never run out of people.”
No one tells you when you’re young that when you’re middle-aged, you can’t cry attractively anymore, the slightest little emotion can make you look like you’ve fallen through ice.
‘I wear a mask. And that mask, it’s not to hide who I am, but to create who I am.’ ”
“If you kill him, that doesn’t make you a hero, it makes you a weapon.”
“Bullies always have small hearts but good memories,”
loyalty is a superpower.”
“Art is coincidence, love is chaos,”
Ted loves adventures, he just absolutely doesn’t want to participate in them.
Art is your homeland.”
Either way: this was a school, and if there’s one thing everyone knows about schools, it’s that a pair of crutches left unattended in a room will, sooner or later, end up on a roof.
“If you feel strange, like you don’t belong anywhere, that’s because you still have your wings. They’re rubbing beneath your skin,”
“You know what Mom always says? You can be whatever you want to in life, as long as you don’t become a critic! Not of other people, and not of yourself. It’s so easy to be a critic, any coward can do that. But art doesn’t need critics, art has enough enemies already. Art needs friends.”
“Picasso said it took him four years to learn to paint like Raphael, but a whole lifetime to learn to paint like a child.”
Great art is a small break from human despair, she explained to her son. It took him twenty years to understand what she meant.
Georgia O’Keeffe: “It never occurs to me that skulls have anything to do with death.”
“No. No one teaches anyone to paint, all we learn are rules and limitations, what we aren’t supposed to do.
You’re not giving us enough oxygen, we’re suffocating without your laughter.
He got called terrible things, because children’s brutality knows no limits in its inventiveness.
They never understood how special it is to be abnormal.
Other children prayed to God, but Ted prayed to the demons, because maybe God decided which people would die, but the demons in children’s heads decided which ones had the strength to live. So Ted prayed loudly into the darkness, for mercy, for the demons to let go of his friend. The demons didn’t listen. They laughed.
It doesn’t take any strength at all to crush someone’s self-confidence if you know where to stomp.
A backpack full of pills and a head full of demons, hardly any child would survive that. The most dangerous place on earth is inside us.
babies are the very worst-functioning versions of people.
“I know a joke! My nephew told it to me yesterday! Do you want to hear it? Okay: you shouldn’t get angry with lazy people. They haven’t done anything!”
“Okay. Okay. The police stop a car for a routine check. Inside the car are one man and four penguins. The policeman asks the man: ‘Why on earth have you got penguins in your car?’ The man replies: ‘They don’t like being home alone.’ The policeman says: ‘But you can’t do this to penguins, surely you understand that? You really should take them to a zoo!’ The man looks surprised, but promises to do as the policeman says. The next day the policeman is standing in the same place when the man drives past again. The policeman stops him and sees that the penguins are still in the car with him, only
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you don’t paint things the way they look, you paint them the way they feel,”
“You happen to me, Mom. You’re my art.”
“Art is completed by the viewer.”
“I would rather die of passion than of boredom!”
You can’t love someone out of addiction, all the oceans are the tears of those who have tried. We’re not allowed to die for our children, the universe won’t let us, because then there wouldn’t be any mothers left.
“He paints like the birds sing.”
Art is what we leave of ourselves in other people.”
Fish always said that kind people were the worst, because at least with mean people you know what you’re dealing with. There’s no limit to how dangerous someone who seems kind can be.
