Never Always Sometimes

Human beings are more or less formulas. Pun intended. We are not any one thing that is mathematically provable. We are more or less than we are anything. We are more or less kind, or more or less not. More or less selfish, happy, wise, lonely.

To be sorry you hurt me is not enough for me to forgive you.

Leave the world a little better than you found it.

No point in living a life less ordinary if you don't know what the other side looks like.

How do text messages make you feel existential? I start thinking about exactly that: how people can edit a thought before sending it out to the world. They can make themselves seem more well spoken than they are, or funnier, smarter. I start thinking that no one in the world is who they say the are, then my mind goes to how I also edit myself, not just online but in real life, except for those rare instances like right now where I'm ranting- even though that's a lie because I've had this train of thought before and damned if I didn't tweak it in my head a few times to make it sound better- and then my mind starts racing so furiously I can't control my thoughts, and I start thinking about robots and wondering if I'm even a real person.

Love traveled, it ran, it covered ground, eager to see more, do more. It was two people keeping pace with each other.

I'm usually a bit awkward in houses that I haven't been to before, so it's a way to not look weird. If I find something I've read before it automatically makes me more comfortable.

Love was lazy as hell. Love laid around in bed, warm from the sheets and the sunlight pouring into the room. Love was too lazy to get up to close the blinds. Love was too comfortable to get up and go pee. Love took too many naps, it watched TV, but not really, because it was too busy kissing and napping. Love was also funny, which somehow made the bed more comfortable, the laughter warming the sheets, softening the mattress and the lovers’ skin.

Love was lazy as hell.

As long as we don't get turned into something that looks more like high school, more like everybody else and less like us, I'll be okay.

Your heart is an asshole for choosing someone else.

The sun kept dipping down into the ocean and the lights came on at the harbor, casting sudden shadows on the ground, illuminating the faces that were just a second ago silhouettes. The sky was golden and purple, the ocean a darker shade of violet.

All the recognizable cliques came by, and so did those un-groupable stragglers who were known by their little circles of two or three.

You call The Smiths clichéd one more time and I’m going to put this song on repeat, then run us off the cliff so that people think we died in some teenage suicide death pact. Then everyone at school will be sad and they’ll do a big teary gesture by making you win prom king, then you’ll be that guy that gets memorialized by a candlelight vigil by people who didn’t know him all that well. You’ll get voted into the cliché hall of fame.” “I would throw up inside my grave.

the best you can ever do is to leave the world a little better than you found it. It doesn’t matter how you do it. Invent a new toaster or reach out a helping hand; just, you know, leave it a little better than you found it.

exaggeration.” “Dave, you know I swore off hyperbole a thousand years ago.

Human beings are more or less formulas. We are not any one thing that is mathematically provable. We are more or less than we are anything. We are more or less kind, or more or less not. More or less selfish, happy, wise, lonely. Just like things are rarely always true or never true, we aren't ever exactly one thing or another. We are more or less.

Well, it’s part of a longer quote, this really beautiful passage about how the best you can ever do is to leave the world a little better than you found it. It doesn’t matter how you do it. Invent a new toaster or reach out a helping hand; just, you know, leave it a little better than you found it.” Dave

to the horizon, a trick they’d learned to know when the sun would be setting. Each finger equaled about fifteen minutes.

Tuxedos were meant for the glamour of nighttime, and Dave looked forward to when the sun would set and the tuxedo would finally fit perfectly.

Julia thought about her mom—how Julia had, in many ways, done the list for her mom’s sake, and how little that would mean to her mom.

It pissed Julia off that her mom still had this hold on her even after that whole meltdown at the tree house.

It’s always hard to tell whether you kids are bored or in love. I guess it’s about fifty-fifty, but I can’t ever tell. I figure that most of the time I’m over-romanticizing, since I was your age when I met my fiancée.

I don’t think I chose wrong,” Dave finally said, weakly. “I don’t know if I made a choice at all.

You can’t have smart people lingering around for too long in horror movies. Otherwise they come up with solutions and not enough people die.” “Good point,” Dave said.

Julia practically woke up laughing, and she refused to let Dave go until her dads saw his hair.

The next morning Dave’s hair not only looked like puke, but like puke that had been allowed to sit out overnight.

Julia, the man collects food in his mustache. He wears pocket protectors, which I’m pretty certain have been out of production since the eighties, right around the time his kind-of-sometimes mullet-hairdo thing went out of style. He makes jokes about irrational numbers. He’s a total cliché of a math teacher. I’m almost certain that he’s not a real person; he’s Frankenstein’s monster but made up of math-teacher clichés. I heard a rumor that he’s got all the known numbers of pi tattooed on his ass.