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“The greatest weapon against stress is our ability to choose one thought over another.” —WILLIAM JAMES I don’t know what superpower William James enjoyed, but I can no more choose my thoughts than choose my name. The way he talked about thoughts was the way I experienced them—not as a choice but as a destiny. Not a catalog of my consciousness, but a refutation of it. When I was little, I used to tell Mom about my invasives, and she would always say, “Just don’t think about that stuff, Aza.” But Davis got it. You can’t choose. That’s the problem.
even though I laughed with them, it felt like I was watching the whole thing from somewhere else, like I was watching a movie about my life instead of living it.
the pressing of my thumbnail against my fingertip had started off as a way of convincing myself that I was real.
“That’s what life is like?” I was trying to get his meaning. “Yeah. It rhymes, but not in the way you expect.”
Thoughts are only thoughts. They are not you. You do belong to yourself, even when your thoughts don’t.”
“You don’t have to be afraid of that thought. Thought is not action.”
You remember your first love because they show you, prove to you, that you can love and be loved, that nothing in this world is deserved except for love, that love is both how you become a person, and why.
