Quotes from Between

454 pages

Rating: (8.5K votes)


“I realise now that I wanted to disappear. To get so lost that nobody ever found me. To go so far away that I'd never be able to make my way home again. But I have no idea why.”
― quote from Between


“A person’s character, I realize, is never black-and-white. There is so much gray.”
― quote from Between


“Teenagers, as everyone knows, tend to believe they are immortal.”
― quote from Between


“Don’t say ‘sorry.’ Just cut it out.”
― quote from Between


“Liz?"

"Hmmm?"

"Why do you care about me?"

The question seems to startle me. It's uncharacteristic for Richie, who is usually so cool and self-assured. I open my eyes. "Why would you ask me that?"

"Because I don't understand. We're so different."

I reach around the side of his face. Once again, I wipe fresh beads of sweat from his forehead. This time, I don't even bother wiping my hands on my pants. I lace my fingers into his again, and the two of us lie together, his damp clamminess seeping onto my made up face and my pretty clothes. Obviously, I couldn't care less.

"But we fit," I whisper. "Like this." And I tighten my grip around him.

"Mmm." He smiles, his eyes still closed.

"You're right. We do."

"Richie...I'm lying. I don't like you."

"You don't?" His voice cracks.

"No." I bring my lips close to his ear. "I love you Richie Wilson.”
― quote from Between



“It occurs to me now that it isn't that I was always certain there was no truth to the rumor; it was that I didn't want to acknowledge the possibility there could be any truth to it.”
― quote from Between


“He can't hear you." Alex sighs. "You aren't the sharpest sheep in the barn, are you?"

"That's not even the right metaphor," I snap, my attention still focused on Richie. "It's the sharpest pencil in the box."

"Right." Alex nods. "Except you are a sheep. I'm not stupid, I just adjusted the metaphor to fit your persona-"

"Oh, shut up. Richie!" I scream again. Alex shakes his head.”
― quote from Between


“You know what my friends and I used to call girls like you? Girls who had everything handed to them on a silver platter, who only cared about how they looked and who was dating the most popular guy?"

"What?"

His grin grows wider. "We called you bitches. You girls were straight-up bitches.”
― quote from Between


“There was never any question, not for either of us, that we'd stay together after high school. Richie Wilson was the love of my life.”
― quote from Between


“Solo quiero que vivan su vida; que sigan adelante sabiendo que cada instante es valioso, que cada día es un regalo; que vean la vida como lo que es: una serie de infinitas posibilidades, no solo de grandes penas sino también de grandes alegrías.”
― quote from Between



“Why should they bother to go grocery shopping? It's not like their son needs to eat or anything like that.”
― quote from Between


“It’s like they don’t even know how to stand beside each other without one groping the other. Their clinginess has always annoyed me.”
― quote from Between


“My favorite uncle was gay,” she says, “and he doesn’t like to dance, either.” She looks at Chad. “I don’t like that word. Fag. Don’t use it, okay?”
― quote from Between


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“The lowly squabble over trifles. The great wage secret wars for power and wealth, and they call it government. Wars of words, and tricks, and guile, but no less bloody for that.”
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“A woman in her thirties came to see me. As she greeted me, I could sense the pain behind her polite and superficial smile. She started telling me her story, and within one second her smile changed into a grimace of pain. Then, she began to sob uncontrollably. She said she felt lonely and unfulfilled.

There was much anger and sadness. As a child she had been abused by a physically violent father. I saw quickly that her pain was not caused by her present life circumstances but by an extraordinarily heavy pain-body. Her pain-body had become the filter through which she viewed her life situation.

She was not yet able to see the link between the emotional pain and her thoughts, being completely identified with both. She could not yet see that she was feeding the pain-body with her thoughts. In other words, she lived with the burden of a deeply unhappy self. At some level, however, she must have realized that her pain originated within herself, that she was a burden to herself. She was ready to awaken, and this is why she had come.

I directed the focus of her attention to what she was feeling inside her body and asked her to sense the emotion directly, instead of through the filter of her unhappy thoughts, her unhappy story. She said she had come expecting me to show her the way out of her unhappiness, not into it.

Reluctantly, however, she did what I asked her to do. Tears were rolling down her face, her whole body was shaking. “At this moment, this is what you feel.” I said. “There is nothing you can do about the fact that at this moment this is what you feel. Now, instead of wanting this moment to be different from the way it is, which adds more pain to the pain that is already there, is it possible for you to completely accept that this is what you feel right now?”

She was quiet for a moment. Suddenly she looked impatient, as if she was about to get up, and said angrily, “No, I don't want to accept this.” “Who is speaking?” I asked her. “You or the unhappiness in you? Can you see that your unhappiness about being unhappy is just another layer of unhappiness?” She became quiet again. “I am not asking you to do anything. All I'm asking is that you find out whether it is possible for you to allow those feelings to be there. In other words, and this may sound strange, if you don't mind being unhappy, what happens to the unhappiness? Don't you want to find out?”

She looked puzzled briefly, and after a minute or so of sitting silently, I suddenly noticed a significant shift in her energy field. She said, “This is weird. I 'm still unhappy, but now there is space around it. It seems to matter less.”

This was the first time I heard somebody put it like that: There is space around my unhappiness. That space, of course, comes when there is inner acceptance of whatever you are experiencing in the present moment.

I didn't say much else, allowing her to be with the experience. Later she came to understand that the moment she stopped identifying with the feeling, the old painful emotion that lived in her, the moment she put her attention on it directly without trying to resist it, it could no longer control her thinking and so become mixed up with a mentally constructed story called “The Unhappy Me.” Another dimension had come into her life that transcended her personal past – the dimension of Presence. Since you cannot be unhappy without an unhappy story, this was the end of her unhappiness. It was also the beginning of the end of her pain-body. Emotion in itself is not unhappiness. Only emotion plus an unhappy story is unhappiness.

When our session came to an end, it was fulfilling to know that I had just witnessed the arising of Presence in another human being. The very reason for our existence in human form is to bring that dimension of consciousness into this world. I had also witnessed a diminishment of the pain-body, not through fighting it but through bringing the light of consciousness to it.”
― Eckhart Tolle, quote from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose


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