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There’s no benchmark for how life’s “supposed” to happen. There is no ideal world for you to wait around for. The world is always just what it is now, and it’s up to you how you respond to it.

Anybody can look at you. It’s quite rare to find someone who sees the same world as you.

I realized the shells were talking in a voice I recognized. I should have; it was my own. Had I always known that? I suppose I had. On some level, unless we’re mad, I think most of us know the various voices of our own imaginations.

I scratched at my right arm, passed through it, and [...] found only my ribs. I flipped back the cover of my pad to the first sheet.
Start with a blank surface.
It called to me, as I was sure such blank sheets had once called to her.
Fill me up. Because white is the absence of memory, the color of can’t remember. Make. Show. Draw. And when you do, the itch will go away. For awhile the confusion will subside.

“Perhaps you’d read me a poem this afternoon,” she said. “Your choice. I miss them so. I could do without Oprah, but a life without books is a thirsty life, and one without poetry is...” She laughed. It was a bewildered sound that hurt my heart. “It’s like a life without pictures, don’t you think? Or don’t you?”

That Pam was the experiment...or so I told myself, but we fool ourselves so much we could do it for a living

“Take it up again,” Kamen advised. “You need hedges.”
“Hedges,” I said, bemused.
“Yes, Edgar,” He looked surprised and a little disappointed, as if I had failed to understand a very simple concept. “Hedges against the night.”

But what has come between me and my father is more than time or distance. It is a change in the self. I am not the child my farther raised, but he is the father who raised her.

If you expect nothing from somebody you are never disappointed.

Every religion lies. Every moral percept is a delusion. Even the stars are a mirage. The truth is darkness, and the only thing that matters is making a statement before one enters it. Cutting the skin of the world and leaving a scar. That’s all history is, after all: scar tissue

The most important things are the hardest to say, because words diminish them. It’s hard to make strangers care about the good things in your life.

It’s like God gave you something, all those stories you can make up, and He said: This is what we got for you, kid. Try not to lose it. But kids lose everything unless somebody looks out for them and if your folks are too fucked up to do it then maybe I ought to.

I picked up the Bikes[...]and started box-shuffling them. That and how to play cribbage was about all I got for older brother stuff from Dennis. The other kids envied that shuffle, and[...]asked me to show them how it went...everyone except Chris. I guess only Chris knew that showing someone would be like giving away a piece of Dennis, and I just didn’t have so much of him that I could afford to pass pieces around.

Lies are a slippery slope, each one usually leading to two more.

He sleeps. Though fate dealt with him strangely,
He lived. Bereft of his angel, he died.
It came about simply, of itself,
As bight follows when the day is ended.

These are the true joys. No other joy, save these. Love is the only ecstasy. All the rest is weeping.

To love, or to have loved, is enough. Ask for nothing more. There is no other pearl to be found in life’s shadowy convolutions. To love is an achievement.

Only because of the confusion of a day like that were those poor little mites in those gardens. If the wardens had spotted them, they would have driven such riff-raff out. Little paupers do not go into public gardens. Yet it ought to be considered that, as children, they have a right to flowers.

Book seven: slang.
Origins of slang in language.
Worth a reread

Since the notion of being Jean Valjean’s daughter and of his being her father was not very clear to her, when in the evening before falling asleep her thoughts ran on, she imagined that her mother’s soul had entered the old man and come to stay close to her.

Remember, Monsieur Madeleine used to read a great deal. Jean Valjean continued to do so. He had come to be a good conversationalist. He had the hidden riches and the eloquence of a truthful and humble mind that has improved itself. He retained just enough abrasive was to season his kindness. He was tough-spirited and soft-hearted.

They seemed very depraved, very corrupt, very debased - heinous, even - but rare are those who fall without sinking into vice. In any case, there is a point where the poor and the wicked become mixed up and lumped together into one fateful word: les miserables - the wretched.

Humanity is of one kind. All men are of the same clay. With no difference, here below at least, in their predetermined fate. The same obscurity before, the same flesh during, the same dust afterwards. But ignorance mingled with the stuff of humankind blackens it. This incurable blackness spreads inside man and there becomes Evil.

“It wrung her heart, but she made her decision. Fantine, as we shall see, had the fierce bravery of life itself.”

Although science may solve the problem of how the universe began, it cannot answer the question: why does the universe bother to exist? I don’t know the answer to that.

“I started there, so now I’m here. I guess we’re all here... ‘cause we’re not all there.”

"Cheaters prosper; many of them do. And even if they don't they are not going to change, because, as a rule, people don't change - not without strong motivation and sustained effort."

“You know how you finish a bag of chips and you hate yourself? You know you’ve done nothing good for yourself. That’s the same feeling, and you know it is, after some digital binge. You feel wasted and hollow and diminished.”

"But still, at twelve, you can't really grasp the enormity of a subject like abortion. [...] However, even as a kid, I could sense the anger - the venom - of those protesters. Something about their eyes, the spittle that exploded from their mouths, the way they brandished their banners like weapons. They were chanting a lot of stuff about love but they seemed full of hate."

How can we live without our lives? How will we know it's us without our past? No. Leave it. Burn it.