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The worst thing about having power over other people’s lives is that you sometimes get things wrong.
You can’t look a gravestone in the eye and ask its forgiveness.
All adults have days when we feel completely drained. When we no longer know quite what we spend so much time fighting for, when reality and everyday worries overwhelm us and we wonder how much longer we’re going to be able to carry on. The wonderful thing is that we can all live through far more days like that without breaking than we think. The terrible thing is that we never know exactly how many.
paper: A great deal is expected of anyone who’s been given a lot.
She became a time traveller trapped inside her own machine.
People sometimes say that sorrow is mental but longing is physical. One is a wound, the other an amputated limb, a withered petal compared to a snapped stem. Anything that grows closely enough to what it loves will eventually share the same roots. We can talk about loss, we can treat it and give it time, but biology still forces us to live according to certain rules: plants that are split down the middle don’t heal, they die.
just a few isolated moments of transcendence. That’s all. But what the hell else is life made of?
They part. We only get moments.
So Maya takes a moment now to mourn the girls who used to play on the other side of the lake before she goes into the party.
Bobo nods and grins. They’re fifteen and seventeen years old, and in ten years’ time they’ll remember this evening, when all the others were inside having a party, and they stood out here and became friends.
Very few people are tequila and champagne at the same time.
She’ll never stop wishing that she hadn’t gone with him up the stairs.
Success demands that we see beyond ourselves.
Because sometimes, when it seriously hurt on the outside, it hurt a little bit less in other places.
“Because you and I aren’t like them. We aren’t the bears from Beartown.”
There are damn few things in life that are harder than admitting to yourself that you’re a hypocrite.
“You’re the one who’s wrong, Maya. Because you think he’s still my best friend.”
didn’t want the bastards to see me bleed,” she whispers to her mother. “Sometimes I’m afraid that they’re going to have to. To understand that you’re a real person,” her mother sobs, clutching her daughter so very, very tightly in her arms.
They laugh, the pair of them. Even on a morning like this. Because they can, and because they must. They still possess that blessing.
“Of all the men in the world that I wouldn’t like to be, he’s the one I’d like to be least of all: the one who hurt that girl’s best friend.”
Another morning comes. It always does. Time always moves at the same rate, only feelings have different speeds. Every day can mark a whole lifetime or a single heartbeat, depending on who you spend it with.
David hates himself for not being better than his dad.
