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But sometimes I felt as if I weren’t doing any living at all.
Not everyone who walks around on two legs is good and decent. Not everyone who walks on two legs knows how to use their intelligence.
The laughing didn’t mean I was in less trouble.
Dad told me once that we have to be very careful with words. “They can hurt people,” he said. “And they can heal people.”
If something was half a lie, it was just a lie. Period.
“Cleanliness—I don’t think that’s a gender thing,” I said.
I guess life hurt everybody. I didn’t understand the logic of this thing we called living.
“I told you that there were only two things you needed to learn in life. You needed to learn how to forgive. And you needed to learn how to be happy.”
“I know you sometimes think that people are like books. But our lives don’t have neat logical plots, and we don’t always say beautiful, intelligent things like the characters in a novel. That’s not the way life is. And we’re not like letters—”
life wasn’t all nice and neat like a book, and life didn’t have a plot filled with characters who said intelligent and beautiful things.
“Wouldn’t it be great, Sally, if we could just push the delete button in our brains and forget the times somebody hurt us?”
just because my love isn’t perfect doesn’t mean i don’t love you.
I knew why people were afraid of the future. Because the future wasn’t going to look like the past. That was really scary.
Maybe that’s what life was. You zigged and you zagged and zigged and zagged some more.
Where was the logic to living?
Maybe that’s what life was. You zigged and you zagged, and then you got up every morning and zigged and zagged some more.
Highways are nice and paved, and they have signs telling you which way to go. Life isn’t like that at all.
Life has a logic all its own. People talk about the highway of life, but I think that’s crap. Highways are nice and paved, and they have signs telling you which way to go. Life isn’t like that at all. There are days when great things happen and everything is beautiful and perfect, and then, just like that, everything can go straight to hell. It’s like getting drunk. At first it feels kinda nice and all relaxed. And all of a sudden the room is spinning and you are throwing up, and, well, maybe life is a little like that.
Maybe everyone’s heaven, and we just don’t know it.”
And maybe being scared was part of the whole growing-up thing, the whole living-life thing.
Sometimes life is shit.”
“Grief is a terrible and beautiful thing.”
There was nothing wrong with getting angry. It was what you did with that anger that mattered.
“If you make a mistake, don’t live in it.” He also said that we do things—important things—only when we’re ready to do them.
But sometimes life forces our hand. Sometimes we have to make decisions whether we’re ready to make them or not. I suppose I will have to learn to bend to the inexplicable logic of my life.
