Instructions for Dancing

The problem with broken hearts isn’t that they kill you. It’s that they don’t

Happiness is tricky. Sometimes you have to fight for it. Sometimes, though—the best times—it sneaks up behind you, wraps an arm around your waist and pulls you close.

It doesn’t matter that love ends. It just matters that there’s love.

Sometimes the only thing to say about a period of time is that it’s passing and that you’re surviving it.

Here's what I think. If you get very, very lucky in this life, then you get to love another person so hard and so completely that when you lose them, it rips you apart. I think the pain is the proof of a life well lived and loved.

Love is the question and the answer and the reason to ask in the first place. It’s everything. All of it.

You can miss the future with people who are still alive too.

Love is too small, too singular a word for the feeling it’s trying to hold. Just one word isn’t enough, so I want to use them all. Sometimes I think love is the reason language was invented.

Yes, falling in love requires a leap of faith. But people only jump because they don’t know what the ground looks like.

Everyone loves to hate love triangles, but actually they’re great. They exist so the main character can choose between different versions of themselves: who they used to be, and who they’re still becoming. Side note: If you ever find yourself choosing between a vampire and a werewolf, choose the vampire.

It was beautiful. But it was sad too. Both things, and at the same time. I don’t know why so much of life is like that.

To love is human. We can't help ourselves.

Maybe the whole point of love is to make more of itself.

Mom said just because a thing ends doesn't make the thing any less real. Just because everything is different now doesn't mean we didn't love each other once. Maybe we will again.

Not everybody can dance good, but everybody can dance.

I’m not scared I won’t survive the pain. I’m scared the pain will never end and I’ll have to live with it forever. The problem with broken hearts isn’t that they kill you. It’s that they don’t.

Couples in love believe they’ll always be in love. It’s one of the ways you know you’re in love in the first place.

How many versions of me will there be in this one lifetime?

It’s hard to completely hate someone who loves someone you love.

In darkness, there's still hope. Some hidden things in the places you can't see. Grief to me feels like an endless landscape of white light. No secrets. No surprises either. You can see clearly all you have lost. Everything that is no longer there.

Sometimes I wish there were a weather report for your life. Tomorrow’s forecast is for routine high school shenanigans in the morning, but with dramatic parental betrayal by late afternoon, ending with wild emotional despair by nightfall. Details after the next commercial break.

I don’t know why we lose the people we love and we’re expected to go on after we lose them. But I know that to love is human. We can’t help ourselves. The philosopher-poets say love is the answer, but it’s more than that. Love is the question and the answer and the reason to ask in the first place. It’s everything. All of it.

What I’ve learned over the last three weeks is that all my old romance novels ended too quickly. Chapters were missing from the end. If they told the real story—the entire story—each couple would’ve eventually broken up, due to neglect or boredom or betrayal or distance or death. Given enough time, all love stories turn into heartbreak stories. Heartbreak = love + time.

I wonder if being with him will always feel like a discovery.

One of the hazards of having friends, especially long time ones, is just how well they know you.

One thing I’ll know for sure: love can last forever.

Hearts grow bigger so you can love more.

It occurs to me that an unhappy ending for one person can mean a happy beginning for another... I think about the way we're all just starring in our own stories" -Evie

People dont come back Evie. The time we get is the time we get.