The Memory Book

by Lara Avery

I want to believe that if you work hard and you have good ideas, you can be who you want to be.

Oh, just, you know, diseasin’. Diseasin’ around.

If you don’t believe the future is going to be better, then you won’t take action to make it better. It sounds cheesy, but there’s another word for cheesy: It’s called sincerity.

I think people fake that they’re having fun a lot of the time in photos, because they want people to think they’re having fun. Well, that’s not life, is it?

“We have to get used to the idea that no one cares as much as us, because guess what, they don’t. Succeed, fail, whatever, no one is going to give you a pat on the back for spending all hours of the day studying, or researching, or giving up everything to write. So we’ve got to just do it for ourselves.”

What you’re doing doesn’t have to be going toward something. Sometimes you can stop, or at least pause. Sometimes you can just be.

“I think it’s easy to group all the factors that get in your way into one big wall: money, race, sexuality, relationships, health, time. These are the forces we supposedly have no control over, that conspire against us. But we’ll never get over them if we look at them that way.

“So when it all gets to be too much, it’s all right that you might ask yourself where you have fallen, why you have fallen, and to tell yourself that you will never fall the same way again.

He’s happier when he’s doing what he wants to do, not just what he feels he needs to do. We all would be better doing that, I think.

But the more you win, the more people you might have to beat out, or have to leave behind, the smaller your world becomes.