“Sometimes you make choices in life and sometimes choices make you.”
“I realize now that dying is easy. Living is hard.”
“If you stay, I'll do whatever you want. I'll quit the band, go with you to New York. But if you need me to go away, I'll do that, too. I was talking to Liz and she said maybe coming back to your old life would be too painful, that maybe it'd be easier for you to erase us. And that would suck, but I'd do it. I can lose you like that if I don't lose you today. I'll let you go. If you stay.”
“And that's just it, isn't it? That's how we manage to survive the loss. Because love, it never dies, it never goes away, it never fades, so long as you hang on to it.”
“Love, it never dies. It never goes away, it never fades, so long as you hang on to it. Love can make you immortal”
“I'm not sure this is a world I belong in anymore. I'm not sure that I want to wake up.”
“Please Mia," he implores. "Don't make me write a song.”
“Losing me will hurt; it will be the kind of pain that won't feel real at first, and when it does, it will take her breath away.”
“Don't be scared...Women can handle the worst kind of pain. You'll find out one day.”
“It's okay,' he tells me. 'If you want to go. Everyone wants you to stay. I want you to stay more than I've ever wanted anything in my life.' His voice cracks with emotion. He stops, clears his throat, takes a breath, and continues. 'But that's what I want and I could see why it might not be what you want. So I just wanted to tell you that I understand if you go. It's okay if you have to leave us. It's okay if you want to stop fighting.'
For the first time since I realized that Teddy was gone, too, I feel something unclench. I feel myself breathe. I know that Gramps can't be that late-inning pinch hitter I'd hoped for. He won't unplug my breathing tube or overdoes me with morphine or anything like that. But this is the first time today that anyone has acknowledged what I have lost. I know that the social worker warned Gran and Gramps not to upset me, but Gramps's recognition, and the permission he just offered me--it feels like a gift.
Gramps doesn't leave me. He slumps back into the chair. It's quiet now. So quiet you can almost hear other people's dreams. So quiet that you can almost hear me tell Gramps, 'Thank you.”
“I just wanted to tell you that I understand if you go. It’s okay if you have to leave us. It’s okay if you want to stop fighting.”
“Fake it 'till you make it.”
“I'm not choosing, but I'm running out of fight.”
“Girlfriend is such a stupid word. I couldn't stand calling her that. So, we had to get married, so I could call her 'wife.”
“People believe what they want to believe.”
“She didn't care that people called her a bitch. 'It's just another word for feminist,' she told me with pride.”
“But I'd understand if you chose love, Adam love, over music love. Either way you win. And either way you lose. What can I tell you? Love's a bitch.”
“This is the you I like. You definitely dressed sexier and are, you know, blond, and that's different. But the you who are tonight is the same you I was in love with yesterday, the same you I'll be in love with tomorrow. I love that you're fragile and tough, quiet and kick-ass. ”
“It's quiet now. So quiet that can almost hear other people's dreams.”
“I have a feeling that once you live through something like this, you become a little bit invincible.”
“All I can think about is how fucked up it would be for your life to end here, now. I mean I know that your life if fucked up no matter what now, forever. And I'm not dumb enough to think that I can undo that, that anyone can. But I can't wrap my mind around the notion of you not getting old, having kids, going to Juilliard, getting to play that cello in front of a huge audience, so that they can get the chills the way I do every time I see you pick up your bow, every time I see you smile at me.”
“But the you who you are tonight is the same you I was in love with yesterday, the same you I’ll be in love with tomorrow.”
“I don't really care. I shouldn't have to care. I shouldn't have to work this hard. I realize now that dying is easy. Living is hard.”
“You can have your wishes, your plans, but at the end of the day, it's out of your control.”
“You just work through it. You just hang in there.”
“We are like Humpty Dumpty and all these king's horses and all these king's men cannot put us back together again”
“Bribes are the glue that's kept teenagers and parents connected for generations”
“How am I supposed to decide this? How can I possibly stay without mom and dad? How can I leave without Teddy? Or Adam? This is too much. I don’t even understand how it all works, why I’m here in the state that I’m in or how to get out of it if I wanted to. If I were to say, I want to wake up, would I wake up right now? I’ve already tried snapping my heels to find Teddy and tried to beam myself to Hawaii, and that didn’t work. This seems a whole lot more complicated.
But in spite of that, I believe it’s true. I hear the nurse’s words again. I am running the show. Everyone’s waiting on me.
I decide. I know this now.
And this terrifies me more than anything else that has happened today.”
“The fantasies of ‘academic freedom’ . . . cannot protect a professor who counsels resistance to the law and speaks, writes, disseminates treason. That a teacher of youth should teach sedition and treason, that he should infect, or seek to infect, youthful minds with ideas fatal to their duty to the country, is intolerable.”
“I leaf through the ancient philosophers and find my newest discoveries there.”
“In the same way that Morse code reduces written language to dots and dashes, the spoken version of the code reduces speech to just two vowel sounds. The key word here is two. Two types of blinks, two vowel sounds, two different anything, really, can with suitable combinations convey all types of information.”
“(In response to 'In the end moral and political truths have to proved on the body.[ ie put one's body on the line to prove a truth]
That's a very dangerous idea. It comes quite close to saying that the willingness to suffer proves the rightness of belief. But is doesn't. The most it can ever prove is the believer's sincerity. And not always that. some people just like suffering.”
“For a wonderful guy who is usually so damn perceptive, you can be pretty obtuse sometimes.”
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