Girl in the Blue Coat

My heart will still ache sometimes. Maybe more often than not. I think it's possible to be healed without feeling whole.

Maybe we can't barter our feelings away, trading good deeds for bad ones and expecting to become whole.

But when it comes down to it, we all die alone.

When things come to an end in a way you didn't expect, in a way you never could have imagined, do they really come to an end? Does it mean you should keep searching, for better answers, for ones that don't keep you up at night? Or does it mean it's time to make peace?

I would care that someone understood we were flawed and scarred and doing the best we could in this war. We were wrapped up in things that were so much bigger than ourselves. We didn't know. We didn't mean to. It wasn't our fault.

Girls in love will do desperate and creative things.

Isn't love the opposite of rational?

Here is the thing about my grief: It’s like a very messy room in a house where the electricity has gone out.

Tow best friends meeting on the street to say so many things at once: I betrayed you, I love you, I want to save you, I'm sorry. All around Europe, people are dying by the hundreds of thousands. And here, in my city, the Nazis slaughtered a family because of events that started with love and jealousy and a slip of the tongue.

Lucky has become such a relative term, when the standards to meet it involve only not being treated like a criminal in your own home city.

let go of a friend I’ll still miss every day. I’ll go back to work. I’ll get better. I’ll get better slowly. I’ll find all the secret, hidden things.

I found a girl who wasn't the girl I was looking for. I let go of a friend I'll still miss every day. I'll go back to work. I'll get better. I'll get better slowly. I'll find all the secret, hidden things.

And you don't have to cry about that boy. Boys are silly. The first thing you need is a best friend.

We need girls who are pretty so the soldiers don’t notice that they’re also smart and brave and working against them

Maybe we can’t barter our feelings away, trading good deeds for bad ones and expecting to become whole.

But I suppose love doesn't stop, even in wars. There's only so much time a day that you can spend being terrified of something before your instinct to feel natural human emotions would kick in.

Fear. That’s right. That was the odor I couldn’t place before. That’s the smell of my beautiful, breaking country.

We were wrapped up in things that were so much bigger than ourselves. We didn’t know. We didn’t mean it. It wasn’t our fault.

I like the idea of that small rebellion, carrying a paper piece of the resistance in my shoes.

...and then we walked to get ice cream, in a relationship at its beautiful beginning, in a world that was closer to the end than we ever knew.

in a relationship at its beautiful beginning, in a world that was closer to the end than we ever knew.

They’re having a march, another one, a chance for rows of them to peacock through the streets in their helmets and black boots.

Hoe heet je?” he asks. He wants to know my name, and he’s asked it in the informal, casual way, how a confident boy would ask a bucktoothed girl her name at a party, and this is good news because I’d much rather he be interested in me than the packages in my basket.

Some green police don't speak it at all, and they're annoyed when we're not fluent in German, as if we should have been preparing our entire lives for the day when they invaded our country.

Isn’t love the opposite of rational?

A long time before Bas died, we had a pretend argument about whose fault it was that he'd fallen in love with me. It's your fault, he told me. Because you're lovable.