Emergency Contact

Loving someone was traumatizing. You never knew what would happen to them out there in the world. Everything precious was also vulnerable.

I like knowing that you exist. It doesn't make me feel any less lonely, because life is lonely, but it makes me feel a lot less alone.

To be a hero, you had to decide it was you.

Penny thought of this Korean saying for when you really, really liked something. You'd say it 'fit your heart exactly.' Sam fit her heart exactly.

It's piles and piles of emotional homework forever if you ever want to qualify as a grown-up

Fiction was fine, but real life was the true freak show.

Penny believed with her whole heart that there were moments - crucial instances - that defined who someone was going to be. There were clues or signs, and you didn't want to miss them.

You've got to understand that not everybody's going to be exactly your kind of person. They're not going to be completely satisfactory or meet your myriad qualifications.

Finally, if you're wondering if it counts and it feels like it counts, it counts.

Let’s just say when I was little and my mom was out, I’d go to bed with a ketchup bottle.” “I already love this story so much...” “It was a foolproof plan. If the bad guys came in I could douse myself and they wouldn’t kill me because I was already dead.” “Jesus, I can’t tell if that’s the cutest thing I’ve ever heard or the absolute most sad.

It wasn't a romance; it was too perfect for that. With texts there were only the words and none of the awkwardness. They could get to know each other completely and get comfortable before they had to do anything unnecessarily overwhelming like look at each other's eyeballs with their eyeballs.

I want a world where everything lights up because I'm in it

I want to be with someone I can talk to. I want to be with someone who automatically has a fat folder on me. Someone who feels lucky when I tell them the most unflattering, scary stuff.

You can be with the same person for a long time and have it be fine and meet someone else who instantly makes you see that it's broken

If you're going to be racist you should at least try to be less ignorant, although maybe that was a contradiction . . .

She smiled. Sam smiled back. She died.

Yoyoyoyoyoyoyoyooyoyoyyoyoyoyo Come by I baked a SHEETCAKE Your favorite Confetti emoji

And for all the people waiting for permission to level up enough before they start working on something big and scary--just go in. Don't be like me.

She wished she could explore his body and inspect him. Learn him and memorize him. That way she'd know what to miss when he was gone. Sam was heartbreakingly, hauntingly beautiful. It made her heart hurt. This couldn't end well.

Dude. Every mom is the most annoying human in the universe, but most of them, besides the super-abusive genuinely bad ones, are in your corner.

The next morning Sam woke up feeling good. Not sensational or anything foolish but supremely okay.

Penny would stop trying. Instead she'd spend time preparing for her future, living in books until the exciting part of her life would begin. Things would matter then. In fact, everything would be different.

it's more this undeniable mood. It's this warm, familiar and exciting feeling where you miss them already when you're with them.

Everyone is capable of putting words down or telling a story. But not everyone will actually do it.

Some people’s coping mechanisms were all about festering and secrecy and ruminating until you grew yourself a nice little tumor in your heart with a side of panic attack. Different strokes.

People scared Penny all the time. Like her mother and even Sam. It meant she loved them.

When Penny left a banana on her desk as an offering, Jude rejected it. She refused it by putting it on Penny's work chair, so when Penny went to write, she sat on it. As tiny passive-aggressive revenges went, it was adorable, and it killed Penny that they couldn't laugh about it.