Every Day

If there's one thing I've learned, it's this: We all want everything to be okay. We don't even wish so much for fantastic or marvelous or outstanding. We will happily settle for okay, because most of the time, okay is enough.

I wake up thinking of yesterday. The joy is in remembering; the pain is in knowing it was yesterday.

This is what love does: It makes you want to rewrite the world. It makes you want to choose the characters, build the scenery, guide the plot. The person you love sits across from you, and you want to do everything in your power to make it possible, endlessly possible. And when it’s just the two of you, alone in a room, you can pretend that this is how it is, this is how it will be.

It would be too easy to say that I feel invisible. Instead, I feel painfully visible, and entirely ignored.

There will always be more questions. Every answer leads to more questions. The only way to survive is to let some of them go.

I want love to conquer all. But love can't conquer anything. It can't do anything on it's own. It relies on us to do the conquering on its behalf.

Kindness connects to who you are, while niceness connects to how you want to be seen.

It's one thing to fall in love. It's another to feel someone else fall in love with you, and to feel a responsibility toward that love.

The moment you fall in love feels like it has centuries behind it, generations - all of them rearranging themselves so this precise, remarkable intersection could happen. In your heart, in your bones, no matter how silly you know it is, you feel that everything has been leading to this, all the secret arrows were pointing here, the universe and time itself crafted this long ago, and you are just now realizing it, you are just now arriving at the place you were always meant to be.

If you stare at the center of the universe, there is coldness there. A blankness. Ultimately, the universe doesn't care about us. Time doesn't care about us. That's why we have to care about each other.

People are rarely as attractive in reality as they are in the eyes of the people who are in love with them. Which is, I suppose, as it should be.

Answerless questions can destroy you. Move on.

Because when something happens, she's the person I want to tell. The most basic indicator of love.

When first love ends, most people eventually know there will be more to come. They are not through with love. Love is not through with them. It will never be the same as the first, but it will be better in different ways.

She is so lost in her sadness that she has no idea how visible it is.

I am a drifter, and as lonely as that can be, it is also remarkably freeing. I will never define myself in terms of anyone else. I will never feel the pressure of peers or the burden of parental expectation. I can view everyone as pieces of a whole, and focus on the whole, not the pieces. I have learned to observe, far better than most people observe. I am not blinded by the past or motivated by the future. I focus on the present because that is where I am destined to live.

You like him because he's a lost boy. Believe me, I've seen it happen before. But do you know what happens to girls who love lost boys? They become lost themselves. Without fail.

It's as if when you love someone, they become your reason.

The clock always ticks. There are times you don't hear it, and there are times that you do.

I am always amazed by people who know something is wrong but still insist on ignoring it, as if that will somehow make it go away. They spare themselves the confrontation, but end up boiling in resentment anyway.

She has been hanging on to the hope of him for so long that she doesn't realize there isn't anything left to hope for.

What is it about the moment you fall in love? How can such a small measure of time contain such enormity? I suddenly realize why people believe in déjà vu, why people believe they've lived past lives, because there is no way the years I've spent on this earth could possibly encapsulate what I'm feeling. The moment you fall in love feels like it has centuries behind it, generations—all of them rearranging themselves so that this precise, remarkable intersection could happen. In you heart, in your bones, no matter how silly you know it is, you feel that everything has been leading to this, all the secret arrows were pointing here, the universe and time itself crafted this long ago, and you are just now realizing it, you are now just arriving at the place you were always meant to be.

I notice you, I want to say. Even when no one else does, I do. I will.

Putting up with the fear of being with the wrong person because you can't deal with the fear of being alone.

Part of growing up is making sure your sense of reality isn't entirely grounded in your own mind.

It’s as simple as that. Simple and complicated, as most true things are.

I love you-I do-but I am afraid of making that love too important. Because you're always going to leave me, A. We can't deny it. You're always going to leave.

Sometimes when you hit send, you can imagine the message going straight into the person's heart. But other times, like this time, it feels like the words are merely falling into a well.

There are many things that can keep you in a relationship," I say. "Fear of being alone. Fear of disrupting the arrangement of your life. A decision to settle for something that's okay, because you don't know if you can get any better. Or maybe there's the irrational belief that it will get better, even if you know he won't change.