Fever

Everyone should remember being born. It doesn't seem fair that we only remember dying.

Because even if the lie is beautiful, the truth is what you face in the end.

Love unrequited is violent. He loves you so much that he's turned it into hate.

It's best to let her go," he says. No, no, that's wrong. It's never right to give up on someone.

He kissed back, all the pages spread out around us like riddles waiting to be solved. Let them wait. Let my genes unravel, my hinges come loose. If my fate rests in the hands of a madman, let death come and bring its worse. I'll take the ruined craters of laboratories, the dead trees, this city with ashes in the oxygen, if it means freedom. I'd sooner die here than live a hundred years with wires in my veins.

I lost everyone I loved," I tell him. I wait for him to look at me, and then I add, "The day I met you.

I've done it all before, I tell myself, and I can do it again. Trust is the strongest weapon.

...maybe hope isn't such a bad thing. Maybe it's what keeps us together.

But there’s no such thing as free. There are only different and more horrible ways to be enslaved.

Momentum,' She repeats. 'You can't just stand there if you want something to fly. You have to run.

Do you know what my father used to say?" I ask her. "He used to say that songs had a heart. A crescendo that can make all your blood rush from your head to your toes.

Once upon a time there were two parents, two children, and a brick house with lilies in the yard. The parents died, the lilies wilted. One child disappeared. Then the other.

I used to have only one name; it used to mean something.

It's never right to give up on someone.

There's a sort of dead passion in him. A spark that, had he more years to live, would be a wildfire.

I should not have loved my daughter as I did. Not in this world in which nothing lives for long. You children are flies. You are roses. You multiply and die.

And then I wonder, does my brother think of me this way? We entered this world together, one after the other, beats in a pulse. But I will be first to leave it. That's what I've been promised. When we were children, did he dare to imagine an empty space beside him where I then stood giggling, blowing soap bubbles through my fingers? When I die, will he be sorry that he loved me? Sorry that we were twins? Maybe he already is.

I'm suddenly finding it hard to know the difference between nightmares and consciousness.

Lovers are weapons, but love is a wound.

It is the face of a girl who has seen the world, who realizes that it hates her, and who hates it in return.

The thing about hope is that it doesn't go away even when it serves no purpose.

Her mind is a bird that's trapped inside her skull, flapping and thrashing, never breaking free.

She has the majesty of hurricanes and explosions.

Living in a place like this, she must have learned how to see all the monsters that can hide a person.

Ah, love. That’s what the world has lost. There’s no more love, only the illusion of it.

I figured it out eventually," she says. She's sitting on the edge of the gurney again; her features slowly materialize as my vision clears. "It's momentum." "What?" I whisper. The feeling returning to my lips, spreading out to my fingertips and toes. "Momentum," she repeats. "You can't just stand there if you want something to fly. You have to run.

There are so many of us, so many girls. The world wants us for our wombs or our bodies, or it doesn't want us at all.

There was a desperate undercurrent to our marriage--a feeling of being in a dream from which I couldn't seem to awaken. A nagging sense that my life, laid out so neatly like the clothes Deirdre left on my divan, was no longer my own.