“It was nice - in the dark and the quiet... and her eyes looking back, like there was something in me worth seeing.”
“Maybe all the strings inside him broke.”
“But I believe in true love, you know? I don't believe that everybody gets to keep their eyes or not get sick or whatever, but everybody should have true love, and it should last at least as long as your life does.”
“Isn't it also that on some fundamental level we find it difficult to understand that other people are human beings in the same way that we are? We idealize them as gods or dismiss them as animals.”
“I'm starting to realize that people lack good mirrors. It's so hard for anyone to show us how we look, & so hard for us to show anyone how we feel.”
“When you go into the ER, one of the first things they ask you to do is rate your pain on a scale of one to ten, and from there they decide which drugs to use and how quickly to use them. I'd been asked this question hundreds of times over the years, and I remember once early on when I couldn't get my breath and it felt like my chest was on fire, flames licking the inside of my ribs fighting for a way to burn out of my body, my parents took me to the ER. nurse asked me about the pain, and I couldn't even speak, so I held up nine fingers.
Later, after they'd given me something, the nurse came in and she was kind of stroking my head while she took my blood pressure and said, "You know how I know you're a fighter? You called a ten a nine."
But that wasn't quite right. I called it a nine because I was saving my ten.”
“The real heroes anyway aren't the people doing things; the real heroes are the people NOTICING things, paying attention.”
“So, I know that she forgives me, just as I forgive her. Thomas Edison’s last words were: “It’s very beautiful over there.” I don’t know where there is, but I believe it’s somewhere, and I hope it’s beautiful.”
“Nothing's wrong. Everything's right. Things couldn't be righter. Things could be less tired. They could be less busy. They could be less caffeinated. But they couldn't be righter. ”
“I felt the unfairness of it, the inarguable injustice of loving someone who might have loved you back but can't due to deadness.”
“Someday no one will remember that she ever existed, I wrote in my notebook, and then, or that I did. Because memories fall apart, too. And then you're left with nothing, left not even with a ghost but with its shadow. In the beginning, she had haunted me, haunted my dreams, but even now, just weeks later, she was slipping away, falling apart in my memory and everyone else's, dying again.”
But he wasn't crying. Curiously, he felt too depressed to cry. Too hurt. It felt as if she'd taken the part of him that cried.”
because I do not want to see a world without him.”
“I'm sorry. I know you loved her. It was hard not to.”
“I wanted to know that he would be okay if I died. I wanted to not be a grenade, to not be a malevolent force in the lives of people I loved.”
“Being in a relationship, that's something you choose. Being friends, that's just something you are. . . [But] I do pick you. . . We've been friends too long to pick, but if we could pick, I'd pick you.”
“Come over here so I can examine your face with my hands and see deeper into your soul than a sighted person ever could.”
“It's hard to believe in coincidence, but it's even harder to believe in anything else.”
“We need never be hopeless because we can never be irreparably broken.”
“The pleasure isn't in doing the thing, the pleasure is in planning it.”
“My head was level with hers as we stared at each other from opposite sides of the glass. I don't remember how it ended - if I went to bed or she did. In my memory, it doesn't end. We just stay there, looking at each other, forever.”
“Leaving feels good and pure only when you leave something important, something that mattered to you. Pulling life out by the roots. But you can't do that until your life has grown roots.”
“I've never known before what it feels like to want someone - not to want to hook up with them or whatever, but to want them, to want them. And now I do. So maybe I do believe in epiphanies.”
“We acknowledge that being the person God made you cannot separate you from God's love.”
“She had this dark cancer water dripping out of her chest. Eyes closed. Intubated. But her hand was still her hand, still warm and the nails painted this almost black dark blue and I just held her hand and tried to imagine the world without us and for about one second I was a good enough person to hope she died so she would never know that I was going, too. But then I wanted more time so we could fall in love. I got my wish, I suppose. I left my scar.”
a place where the young and irreparably broken sink into love.”
But, Gus, my love, I cannot tell you how thankful I am for our little infinity. I wouldn't trade it for the world. You gave me a forever within the numbered days, and I'm grateful.”
“The pure and simple truth
Is rarely pure and never simple.
What's a boy to do
When lies and truth are both sinful?”
“We all want to do something to mitigate the pain of loss or to turn grief into something positive, to find a silver lining in the clouds. But I believe there is real value in just standing there, being still, being sad.”
