“I don't know how you say good-bye to whom and what you love. I don't know a painless way to do it, don't know the words to capture a heart so full and a longing so intense.”
“Where is home?
Home is where the heart can laugh without shyness.
Home is where the heart's tears can dry at their own pace.”
“Why should I just sit around hoping it happens when maybe I can do something to make it happen?”
“He shook his head and gave this laugh, a good laugh, and just looked at me. "You always this happy?"
"No," I said, laughing. "It's you. Every time I see you, I just...I don't know. You make me smile.”
“After school I all but ran to Gran's and it was funny how even with her so sick, being with her could still make me feel safe.”
“I would not willingly peel back the scar tissue protecting the deepest chambers of my heart and reveal the bruised hollows pooled with the blood of old wounds – the terror comes just thinking about it – but now, facing darkness I am left with no choice.
I love you, and because of that am going to try and raise the dead. – Louise Bell Closson, How It Ends”
“So I wait for him because I always have, because out of all the moments that went wrong, I think there were just as many that went right, just as much love and heat and want as hurt, disappointment, and cruelty. I want to believe there's a balance here, that out of this tragedy will come some good, and there will be a happy ending.”
“Social rejection—or fearing it—is one of the most common causes of anxiety. Feelings of inclusion depend not so much on having frequent social contacts or numerous relationships as on how accepted we feel, even in just a few key relationships.20 Small wonder that we have a hardwired system that is alert to the threat of abandonment, separation, or rejection: these were once actual threats to life itself, though they are only symbolically so today. Still, when we hope to be a You, being treated like an It, as though we do not matter, carries a particularly harsh sting.”
“In wine was truth, perhaps, but in whisky, the way Hoffman sluiced it down, was an army of imaginary rats climbing your legs.”
“When I was in my teens, I made an appraisal of how comfortable my life could turn out when I became the age I am now. Because of a mechanical failure, the prediction was inexact.”
“The authority of government, even such as I am willing to submit to— for I will cheerfully obey those who know and can do better than I, and in many things even those who neither know nor can do so well— is still an impure one: to be strictly just, it must have the sanction and consent of the governed. It can have no pure right over my person and property but what I concede to it.”
“Like children in a dark room, like wayfarers passing a graveyard at night, the four men in the canoe filled the surrounding darkness with the fear from their own hearts.”
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