This Thing Between Us Quotes

“What they say: call me. What they mean: it’s your responsibility to let me know when I have to care.”
― Gus Moreno, This Thing Between Us

“I had no story to follow. My favorite character was gone.”
― Gus Moreno, This Thing Between Us

“When you died I mourned you, but also the version of myself I was with you.”
― Gus Moreno, This Thing Between Us

“I’m afraid that when we die, we end up wherever we always thought we’d end up. If we want to go to heaven, we go to heaven. If we believe in reincarnation, we come back as a baby or an animal or a tree. If we think we’re going to hell, we’ll burn forever, and we’ll never realize that we were the ones to put ourselves there.”
― Gus Moreno, This Thing Between Us

“You were you and I was me and there was this thing between us.”
― Gus Moreno, This Thing Between Us

“But we still worked together somehow, like two different animals that learned to hunt as a team. You were you and I was me and there was this thing between us.”
― Gus Moreno, This Thing Between Us

“Your grave turned into a bookmark we couldn’t get past. That we kept going back to.”
― Gus Moreno, This Thing Between Us

“My head hurt. I was tired of getting money in exchange for loved ones.”
― Gus Moreno, This Thing Between Us

“A silver lining to your death: I didn’t have to feel things anymore. Your friends’ feelings in that moment did not register on any level. That part of my life was over. The part that could care for another person, invest in them, it froze and then sheared off like a glacier, into the dead ocean of things I couldn’t access anymore. It felt like freedom, actually.”
― Gus Moreno, This Thing Between Us

“An owl flew over the cabin and swept into the tree line. I stepped aside for you to see and then remembered you were dead.”
― Gus Moreno, This Thing Between Us

“It’s like being at a party and the one friend you know is suddenly gone.”
― Gus Moreno, This Thing Between Us

“I'm sorry. For the things that still need to be written out”
― Gus Moreno, This Thing Between Us

“People cannot bear to think there are channels of human experience that are closed off to them, that they’ll never know. People want to believe their experience is universal, that nothing’s outside their scope.”
― Gus Moreno, This Thing Between Us

“In this world we struggle and bitch and fail and hurt and then weep over someone checking out of it all.”
― Gus Moreno, This Thing Between Us

“A part of me always dreamed of this, never having to work again, moving far away from everyone I knew. In the mountains no one was trying to gauge themselves against me. It was just snow, trees, the mountain sky, and the whipped disks of clouds above the peaks. The town below me, well within view. And full of strangers, which was what I wanted. If I was left alone then there was no one for me to hate.”
― Gus Moreno, This Thing Between Us

“It meant sooner or later I was going to lose you again. No matter how deformed I felt, or how hobbled I was by your absence, with time I would develop the right callus to get on with life and you would slip into the background like a hand on someone’s leg that they feel less and less the longer it stays there.”
― Gus Moreno, This Thing Between Us

“I tried catching you but you fell through me.”
― Gus Moreno, This Thing Between Us

“When you died I mourned you, but also the version of myself I was with you. So there were two deaths.”
― Gus Moreno, This Thing Between Us

“They were so quick to define you, to pin you down to something. Who didn’t like music? What dead person didn’t have a great smile? A great laugh? No one was calling you these things when you were alive. Alive, you got to be just you. Dead, they needed to encapsulate you, harness you into a favorite movie they could buy, a favorite motto they could tattoo. No one got that you were those things primarily because you were you, not because they made you.”
― Gus Moreno, This Thing Between Us

“So what if the universe was a hologram? So what if this was all in our heads? The points being made never stuck. I couldn’t synthesize this knowledge, but even worse, I couldn’t even regurgitate it to at least convince myself I knew something about life, or death, or meaning.”
― Gus Moreno, This Thing Between Us

“I’m from Mexico. We’re all a little haunted.”
― Gus Moreno, This Thing Between Us

“But other things have gotten clearer, and each time I’ve sat down with the pad it feels like I’m honing something, I’m paring something down, I’m that car commercial where the guy stands in front of a block of clay and carves out a new design. And it was the idea of talking to you, that the flames would engulf these pages and the words would roll into the smoke and float through the veil and you would be there for it, that helped me figure out a way to get this all out. Down on paper. Thank you. I love you. I’m sorry. Thank you. I love you.

I’m sorry. For the things that still need to be written out.”
― Gus Moreno, This Thing Between Us

“To them, for me to move to a cabin in the mountains, where I didn’t know a single person, had no job, it was like I was giving up. They were goddamn right.”
― Gus Moreno, This Thing Between Us

“If I was left alone then there was no one for me to hate.”
― Gus Moreno, This Thing Between Us

“Your absence felt less like nonexistence and more like we were both in the same house but in separate rooms, cut off by the flimsiest door.”
― Gus Moreno, This Thing Between Us

“The creepy coincidences, the weird stuff, was building, gathering into itself. As long as we didn’t give it a name, it stayed amorphous. It couldn’t take shape.”
― Gus Moreno, This Thing Between Us

“don’t want it to be that what I believe is what matters most. I want the truth, without a brain to skew it, without eyes to filter it.”
― Gus Moreno, This Thing Between Us

“I’m afraid that when we die, we end up wherever we always thought we’d end up. If we want to go to heaven, we go to heaven. If we believe in reincarnation, we come back as a baby or an animal or a tree. If we think we’re going to hell, we’ll burn forever, and we’ll never realize that we were the ones to put ourselves there. That in the afterlife we all tapped into a mechanism, some larger system bent on fulfilling our personal ideas of death.”
― Gus Moreno, This Thing Between Us

“Everyone you’ve ever loved. Your family. The dog. Her. The earth is not a good place. It’s slippery. You live on the edge of a blade. On one side is an abyss. On the other side is an abyss. Whatever happens on the blade, the horrors, I can’t control.”
― Gus Moreno, This Thing Between Us

“The details bloomed all at once, not the way a story usually unfolded, but beginning, middle, and end all at the same time, the way stories happened to God.”
― Gus Moreno, This Thing Between Us