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“I think my dad is a good man who has succumbed to the madness of the world.”
“So many do, my dear. So many do.”
Arlene never takes her eyes off the box. “You know, when I was younger, I thought if I lived long enough, I’d understand things better. But I’m an old woman now, Mim, and I swear, the longer I live, the less things make sense.”
“Help is help to anyone, Mary. Even if they don’t know they’re asking for it.”
Cherokee blood, I pass this phrase along to you: have a vision, unclouded by fear.
another one of my mother’s Cherokee proverbs. When you were born, you cried while the world rejoiced. Live your life so that when you die, the world cries while you rejoice.
So I float in silence, watching the final touches of this perfect moonrise, and in a moment of heavenly revelation, it occurs to me that detours are not without purpose. They provide safe passage to a destination, avoiding pitfalls in the process.
can’t shake that feeling, one of the worst in the world . . . I am tired of being alone.
there really is no kind of success like survival—
makes me about as uncomfortable as a nun in a whorehouse, as my mom used to say.
Ahab laughs and so do I, and it occurs to me again how often laughter accompanies tears.
“Symptoms of psychosis, Mr. Malone, are not themselves psychoses.
Long story short, I’m not going to take the medication anymore, because I don’t need it. Mom never thought so, and neither did Makundi. Abilitol is its name.
Mom used to say you could tell a lot by the way a person treats the innocent, and Walt is nothing if not innocence personified.
I cry because I’ve never smiled like that, not once in my life. I cry because I love. For some reason, I always have.
My earliest memories of music had nothing to do with listening, and everything in the world to do with feeling.
“I guess I just think life is more mysterious than
“So you believe in God because you’re alive?” “Guess I should just say that next time, huh?”
What if . . . what if . . . what if . . . I play the What If? game all the time. But it’s rigged, is the thing. Impossible to win. Asking What If? can only lead to Maybe Things Could Have Been Different, via Was It My Fault?
And even though things are heavy right now, it occurs to me how happy I am just to be with my friends. Sure, I’d love to kiss-hug-marry-hold Beck, but for now, I’m happy just to be with him. Sometimes being with gets overlooked I think.
“You showed up. And that’s really something.”
it is my belief that there are some people whose sole purpose of existence is to show the rest of us how not to act.
Beck is teaching me how to be a better person, and when you find someone who inspires you like that, you hold on for dear life.
DO NOT UNDERESTIMATE THE VALUE OF FRIENDS.
“I don’t have to be your mother to care about you.”
People say home is where the heart is, but I think maybe
home is the heart. Not a place or a time, but an organ, pumping life into my life.
That’s the thing about life—you don’t know
how long you have until you’re dead, and by then, you don’t know much of anything at all.
Because even though honesty is hard, you really have to murder people with it if you expect to be a person of any value at all.
Be a kid of honesty. Wave it like a banner for all to see.
be a k...
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loves sur...
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Squeal with delight over puppies and cupcakes and birthday parties. Be curious, but content. Be loyal, but independent. Be kind. To everyone. Treat every day like you’re making waffles. Don’t settle for the first guy (or girl) unless he’s the right guy (or girl). Live your effing life. Do so with gusto, because my God, there’s nothing sorrier than a gusto-less existence. Know yourself. Love yourself. Be a good friend. Be a kid of hope and substance. Be a kid of appetite, Iz. You know what ...
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I miss the way things used to be. I miss home.
I know what God makes when He’s angry: a person with the capacity for emptiness. But not the always-emptiness of Dustin or Caleb or Poncho Man. A drained emptiness. A person who was once full. A person who lived and dreamed, and above all, a person
who cared for something—for someone. And within that person, he places the possibility of poof—gone—done—to be replaced by a Great Empty Nothingness. I know this is true, because right now, a Great Empty Nothingness is staring me right in the fucking face.
You ever have the feeling you lost something important, only to discover it was never there to begin with? I feel all my sharp edges.
And I hope she knows that kind of love is not nothing. It’s a huge something, maybe the biggest of all.
you ready to go home?” she asks.
A montage rolls through my head, and like a curtain call, the characters of my trip take a bow
“I’m blind,” I whisper. “In my right eye.” Because sometimes a thing’s not a thing until you say it out loud.
You have loved me real.
an honest voice is more compelling than a pretty one.
Art should reflect something inside the artist, something human, something flawed. Anything else is robot art. And what could be more boring?
davidarnoldbooks.com,
lies the greatest truth of all: that we are basically dead without our friends.
Inevitably, the character evolves; I can only hope to recognize this evolution as it happens, and adjust the story accordingly.
A good friend of mine, Bryson McCrone,* is very open about his own struggles with mental illness, and when I asked what he wished people knew about it, he said, “I want people to know that there is help and that you can be okay again . . . no matter what forces may stand against you (friends, family, your own brain), fight like hell to get the help you need. Just because it is in your head doesn’t make it any less real than a broken bone.”
In her own words, “You can laugh and cry, Iz. Because they’re basically the same thing.”
