More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
the world was never as simple as it wanted you to believe it was. Hard exteriors could hide soft hearts, a chosen family could be more important than a blood one…and even the safest of places could be made into a trap.
sometimes you heard a nasty word so often it lost its fangs. That, or I guess your skin eventually could grow too strong, too thick to cut. My heart didn’t bruise the way it used to—they were way too late to get in that particular blow.
As Vida always said, there are times you have to listen to your gut and tell common courtesy to fuck right off.
As Vida always said, the best way through bullshit was to wade in, hold your nose with one hand and a grenade in the other, and cut straight through it. Right
Some people feared silence. They did anything to fill it, talking about things that didn’t matter, asking questions just to hear some kind of response. It seemed to me that a lot of people saw it as a kind of failure. Evidence that they weren’t interesting enough, or that a bond wasn’t strong enough. Or maybe they were just nervous about what it would reveal about themselves.
There was only one thing I needed to remember. All of this was impossible, and none of it would ever be real.
When I thought of them now, it was like seeing sunlight come through a stained-glass window. Each memory had its own color, its own feeling, and together they created something beautiful held together by a dark frame.
he’s funny and nice and he dresses like a walking hug.”
He was making it sound like one friendship was better or more important than the other. That wasn’t true. They were just different. The love was exactly the same.
“I don’t want to be your stranger.” I glanced back. “Then don’t be.”
The cruelest truth about life is that it just goes on—the sun rises, gravity keeps your feet on the ground, flowers open their faces to greet the sky. Your world could be dissolving with grief or pain or anger, but the sky would still give you the most breathtaking sunrise of violet warming to shell pink.
Need made us do things, take things, we never would have otherwise.
“It’s all right,” I told Owen. “You don’t have to say anything. But you should know that your voice is necessary, and you deserve to be heard.”
“That wasn’t monitoring the situation so much as listening to a man pet himself for being so smart and so pretty,”
“I sincerely hope you’re right about her long game,” Priyanka said, “but right now it feels like we’re the chess piece on the board that’s going to be sacrificed first.” “You don’t even play chess,” Roman cut in. “True,” Priyanka said, “but I’m fluent in grand analogies.” I shook my head. “It’s just politics.”
The only way to live is by following whatever message your heart is beating out for you.” “Did you read that on a greeting card?” I asked. “No, on some kind of blood pressure medication ad,” she admitted, “but it doesn’t make it any less true.”
Friendship is weird. I think it only works when you finally figure out what buttons you have to push to help them and what buttons are triggers that’ll only hurt them.”
That’s one of the few things rehabilitation camps gave you: the ability to hold in tears on command, and the knowledge of how to cry so no one will hear you.
the concept of shikata ga nai, the knowledge that some things in life were simply outside of your control thanks to circumstances.
“Stories are powerful. You can give people a list of facts and they’ll be dismissed or ignored. People believe what they feel is true. So I have to make them feel something.
Sometimes it just feels like it’s too much, you know? I always thought the world would feel easier as I got older, but I’ve only gotten more practice at pretending it is.”
My heart is a wheel. It breaks all the damn time, but, most days, it just rolls on.”
Something is happening in America, I thought. And no one wants us to know.
We’ve inherited the darkest legacy, but they don’t know that we’ve learned how to thrive in shadows and create our own light.”
One person, for better or worse, could have enough power to impact many lives. It just depended on their platform, on
that rare chemistry of being the right person in the right moment. But I understood the sentiment, probably better than most. I could not control the world, so I controlled my voice. When things were overwhelming and moving forward felt impossible, small steps were easier to take than big strides.
