“Sadness is an emotion you can trust. It is stronger than all of the other emotions. It makes happiness look fickle and untrustworthy. It pervades, lasts longer, and replaces the good feelings with such an eloquent ease you don’t even feel the shift until you are suddenly wrapped in its chains. How hard we strive for happiness, and once we finally have the elusive feeling in our grasp, we hold it briefly, like water as it trickles through our fingers.”
“I believe in loneliness so deep and profound it has a physical presence”
“I have to stop fucking killing people.”
“You have to be willing to be happy. Despite the mess of your life—just accept what’s happened, throw away your ideals, and create a new map of happiness to follow.”
“The loss of innocence is the most severe of growing pains.”
“Weak people let their pain choke them to a slow, emotional death. Strong people use that pain, Margo. They use it as fuel.”
“I want to be fireproof. Nothing should have the power to break my heart.”
“I've always been afraid that love isn't real. So I watched movies that assured me that there can be happy endings and shit.”
“Life is all about allowing people choices to be who they want. But the majority of people choose to be worthless.”
“We are all pretenders in life, finding a patch of humanity that we relate to, and then embrace it. We come straight down the birth canal and our parents start telling us who to be, simply by being themselves. We see their lives, their cars, the way they interact, the rules they set, and the foundations for our own lives are laid. And when our parents aren’t molding us, our situations are. We are all sheep, who get jobs, and have babies, and diet, and try to carve something special out for ourselves using the broken hearts, and bored minds, and scathed souls life delivered to us. And it’s all been done before, every bit of suffering, every joy.
And the minute you realize that we are all pretenders is the minute everything stops intimidating you: punishment, and failure, and death. Even people. There is nothing so ingenious about another human who has pretended well. They are, in fact, just another soul, perhaps more clever, better at failing than you are. But not worth a second of intimidation.”
“Be bold about your right to be loved.”
“Nothing is better than the discovery of another living, breathing human, who fights the same as you do, loves the same as you do, and understands you with such clarity that it feels erotic.”
“The moon is wicked, jealous of the sun. People do bad things in the dark, under the hollow gaze of the moon. It’s smiling at me now, proud of my sin.”
“Every bad thing that happens here reminds people of what they’re trying to forget”
“I can’t stay the way I am. I don’t remember what it’s like to be free. To be wide open without fear. I need something to break me. Just enough so that I have new pieces to work with—make them into something else. I don’t want to give anyone the right to treat me like a loser. I don’t want to be fat, I don’t want to live in the Bone, I don’t want to be without knowledge. I won’t be the girl who people laugh at. Not anymore. Good thing I memorized their license plate. Just in case.”
“I told myself that I was the one pretending to fit in, but life has taught me that we are all pretenders. Every single one of us.”
“What a hypocrite I am; I spend my whole life reading books that allude to happiness, when I refuse to experience it. Sadness is an emotion you can trust. It is stronger than all of the other emotions. It makes happiness look fickle and untrustworthy. It pervades, lasts longer, and replaces the good feelings with such an eloquent ease you don’t even feel the shift until you are suddenly wrapped in its chains. How hard we strive for happiness, and once we finally have the elusive feeling in our grasp, we hold it briefly, like water as it trickles through our fingers. I don’t want to hold water. I want to hold something heavy and solid. Something I can understand. I understand sadness, and so I trust it. We are meant to feel sadness, if only to protect us from the brief spiels of happiness. Darkness is all I’ll ever know; maybe the key is to make poetry out of it.”
“Dreams are plans; they get your heart moving, and once your heart gets moving, your brain will follow”
“You are worth loving. They just don’t have any love to give. Forgive them, Margo.”
“Depression is a deep, black wave—so powerful, building from a swell and rising … rising”
“Do we create our own heroes and then kill them with the truth?”
“My mother is beautiful in the same way that a storm is beautiful. She is wild and destructive, and in the middle of her fury you feel her God given right to destroy.”
“But the truth of the matter—as I’ve come to understand it—is that people will ignore every warning sign when blinded by their thirst for something. It’s better to not be thirsty.”
“We are all pretenders in life, finding a patch of humanity that we relate to, and then embrace it.”
“Stop feeling useless and worthless. Stop drowning in regret. Stop listening to the persistent voice of your past failures. You were that child once, who Margo would have killed for. Fight for yourselves. You have a right to live, and to live well. You’ll inherit flaws; you’ll develop new ones. And that’s okay. Wear them, own them, use them to survive. Don’t kill others; don’t kill yourselves. Be bold about your right to be loved. And most importantly, don’t be ashamed of where you’ve come from, or the mistakes you’ve made. In blindness, love will exhume you.”
“People—our dads, our moms, our friends—they are so broken they don’t even know that most of what they do reflects that brokenness. They just hurt whoever is in their wake. They don’t sit and think about what their hurt is doing to us. Pain makes humans selfish. Blocked off. Focused inward instead of outward”
“That’s because humans are built to live with pain. Weak people let their pain choke them to a slow, emotional death. Strong people use that pain, Margo. They use it as fuel.”
“Darkness is all I’ll ever know; maybe the key is to make poetry out of it.”
“Wanting someone to notice you all the while praying no one does.”
“I've never been to the ocean, never heard the waves lick the sand in that quiet shushing you read about in books. I've never been to the zoo, smelled the elephant piss, and heard the cries of the monkeys. I've never had frozen yogurt from one of those places where you pull on the handle and fill your own cup with whatever you like. I've never eaten dinner at a restaurant with napkins that you set on your lap and silverware that isn't plastic. I've never painted my nails like the other girls at school, in bright neons and decadent reds. I've never been more than ten miles from home. Ten miles. It's like I live in the forever ago, not where buses rumble and trains have racks. I've never had a birthday cake, though I've wanted one very much. I've never owned a bra that is new, and had to cut the tags off with the scissors from the kitchen drawer. I've never been loved in a way that makes me feel as if I was supposed to be born, if only to feel loved. I've never, I've never, I've never. And it's my own fault. The things that we never do because someone makes us fearful of them, or makes us believe we don't deserve them. I want to do all my nevers-- alone or with someone who matters. I don't care. I just want to live.”
“It is the chiefest point of happiness, she scribbled quickly, before the Commander could see, that a man is willing to be what he is."
Chapter 6 · Page 53 · Location 957”
“Now, it has been independently shown that people hate to lose something more than they enjoy gaining it. For example, they don't mind paying for something with a credit card even when told there is a discount for cash, but they hate paying the same amount if they are told there is a surcharge for using credit. As a result, people will often refuse to gamble for an expected profit (they turn down bets such as "Heads, you win $120; tails, you pay $100), but they will gamble to avoid an expected loss (such as "Heads, you no longer owe $120; tails, you now owe an additional $100"). (This kind of behavior drives economists crazy, but is avidly studied by investment firms hoping to turn it to their advantage.) The combination of people's loss aversion with the effects of framing explains the paradoxical result: the "gain" metaphor made the doctors risk-averse; the "loss" metaphor made them gamblers.”
“I mean, Marty really likes it,” Denise continued, “but it just seems like nothing but boobs and snow and blood. And the frozen zombie things. I just don’t get them. It feels like not a lot ever actually happens, y”
“What you humans need to do is find beauty in the fact that something is naturally the way it is. Perhaps then you wouldn't be so destructive." [Meems says to Ellani]”
“Peter, as in Peter Pan. Pretty fitting, really. Dante was like a boy who never grew up. At least he wasn’t calling himself Van Helsing and me Buffy. Might not go over too well with the undead crowd.”
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