A List of Cages

It's strange how many ways there are to miss someone. You miss the things they did and who they were, but you also miss who you were to them. The way everything you said and did was beautiful or entertaining or important. How much you mattered

Why is time like that? Why does it slow down in the places you don’t want it to, but it speeds away when you’re happy?

Because people heal a whole lot faster when they're with someone who loves them

Getting smacked in the face with a Harry Potter book does not qualify as a fight," Charlie says. "First of all, it wasn't just any Harry Potter book. It was Order of the Phoenix." Matt gasps. He knows that Order of the Phoenix is the longest and most potentially dangerous of all the Harry Potter books when used as a weapon.

If I really had powers, I could turn off pain the way I can shut my eyes. But I can’t. I feel it. Skin doesn’t get thicker. Instead, it remembers.

when you’re between two shores and no one can see you, you don’t really exist at all.

And when you smile…my grandmother calls them big-soul smiles. She says some people have souls so big that they spread out, touching everyone they pass.” Emerald wipes her wet face again. “There are different ways to help people, Adam. There are different ways to do good.

I know what I think, but people don't want you to say what you think. They want you to say what they think. And knowing what that is isn't easy.

It's strange how many ways there are to miss someone. You miss the things they did and who they were, but you also miss who you were to them. The way everything you said and did was beautiful or entertaining or important. How much you mattered.... When you know you're going to tell someone everything, you see your day through your eyes and theirs, as if they're living it alongside you. But when you don't, it isn't only not seeing double--it's not seeing at all. Because if they aren't there, you aren't either.

I used to think struggle was what aged you, but if that were the case, Julian should have been a hundred years old. Now I wonder if the opposite is true. Maybe instead of accelerating your age, pain won't let you grow.

It's strange how many ways there are to miss someone. You miss the things they did and who they were, but you also miss who you were to them. The way everything you said and did was beautiful or entertaining or important. How much you mattered.

She said no one is evil, only unhappy, and unhappiness festers inside like sores.

I'm dizzy. I'm here. I'm alive.

When you know you’re going to tell someone everything, you see your day through your eyes and theirs, as if they’re living it alongside you. But when you don’t, it isn’t only not seeing double—it’s not seeing at all. Because if they aren’t there, you aren’t either.

You don’t really know people when your back is turned.

There was nowhere to go that me and the pain didn’t follow.

This part is hardest. A billion years of evolution tells your cells to run. But you can’t run. You have to turn around and face the desert wall.

Monday is like all Mondays. Like I’m sitting at the bottom of a pool, listening underwater to people living up above.

And when you smile…my grandmother calls them big-soul smiles. She says some people have souls so big that they spread out, touching everyone they pass.

I want my body to be mine again.

Next time you have to hand something in, just tell me. I can proofread it or whatever." I nod, but I know I won't. If he's being nice enough to offer, I should be nice enough to never do it.

What keeps you trapped?...What keeps you from living the life you want? What keeps you from being free?

But wanting isn't the same as having.

Because when you’re between two shores and no one can see you, you don’t really exist at all.

My mother once said that the planet was like an enormous womb, and every single one of us was a fetus. Death was nothing to be afraid of. It was just birth to another world, and someone would be waiting for us there. Sometimes I try to see this, my mother and father as two newborns holding hands and ejected into this other world. There they are just beginning.

But whenever I would imagine leaving, I’d see the blue sky like the ocean—no walls or shore or end in sight. And I’d see myself disappear.

I should be afraid, but I feel empty. I remember my father’s hands. My mother’s hands. What hands are meant to do.

When someone says something, they automatically know what to say back. But for me it's as if the pathway between my brain and mouth is damaged, like a rare form of paralysis.