You (You, #1)

by Caroline Kepnes

Work in a bookstore and learn that most people in this world feel guilty about being who they are.

If people could handle their self-loathing, customer service would be smoother.

My middle school health teacher told us that you can hold eye contact for ten seconds before scaring or seducing someone.

“The only thing crueler than a cage so small that a bird can’t fly is a cage so large that a bird thinks it can fly. Only a monster would lock a bird in here and call himself an animal lover.”

It’s been seven hours and fifteen days since you took your love away.

The assholes are always puzzled when the order of the universe is restored, when they are held accountable for their cowardly, pretentious, loveless ways.

Brunch, a meal invented by rich white chicks to rationalize day drinking and bingeing on French toast.

It’s like Michael Cunningham says in The Hours: Happiness is believing that you’re gonna be happy. It’s hope.

What a shame to be so angered by what you don’t have that you treat what you do have like it’s nothing.

I want life to move slowly because I want to anticipate you with all my heart, greet you with all my heart, fuck you with all my heart and miss you with all my heart.

No man can ever be a mouse in your house because you’ll always have someone—a hot clerk in a bookstore, a horny shrink, a closeted rich girl. Someone will always watch over you and you believe that you are special. In the cage, you feel loved, not trapped. Just like me.

I say and the problem with books is that they end. They seduce you. They spread their legs to you and pull you inside. And you go deep and leave your possessions and your ties to the world at the door and you like it inside and you don’t want for your possessions or your ties and then, the book evaporates.

There is no better boost in the present than an invitation to the future.