Night Film

Just when you think you've hit rock bottom, you realize you're standing on another trapdoor.

Mortal fear is as crucial a thing to our lives as love. It cuts to the core of our being and shows us what we are. Will you step back and cover your eyes? Or will you have the strength to walk to the precipice and look out?

I hate how the people who really get you are the ones you can never hold on to for very long. And the ones who don’t understand you at all stick around.

People don’t realize how easy life is to change. You just get on the bus.

It’s easy to be yourself in the dark.

There might be a Starbucks on every corner and an iPhone at every ear, but don’t worry, people are still fucking crazy.

She told me her father taught her to live life way beyond the cusp of it, way out in the outer reaches where most people never had the guts to go, where you got hurt. Where there was unimaginable beauty and pain ... They were always reminding themselves to stop measuring life in coffee spoons, mornings and afternoons, to keep swimming way, way down to the bottom of the ocean to find where the mermaids sang, each to each. Where there was danger and beauty and light. Only the now.

Because every one of us has our box, a dark chamber stowing the thing that lanced our heart. It contains what you do everything for, strive for, wound everything around you.

It's not fair." "It's not. But then, that's the game. It makes life great. The fact that it ends when we don't want it to. The ending gives it meaning.

It’s what we chase but never find. It is the mystery of our lives, the understanding that even when we have everything we want it is one day to leave us. It’s the something unseen, the lurking devastation, the darkness that gives our lives dimension.

Life had been a suit I'd only put on for special occasions. Most of the time I kept it in the back of my closet, forgetting it was there. We were meant to die when it was barely stitched anymore, when the elbows and knees were stained with grass and mud, shoulder pads uneven from people hugging you all the time, downpours and blistering sun, the fabric faded, buttons gone.

…deep-diving love, a love that excavates you. It’s something you have to have before you die in order to have lived.

…how monstrous the people you loved could be.

As much as some people would like to believe, for their own peace of mind, that the appearance of evil in this world had a clean cause, the truth was never that simple.

What you tend to find in the personal lives of brilliant men is devastation akin to a nuclear bomb going off.

Betrayal isn't ridiculous. It's the reason empires fall.

For every man there exists bait he cannot resist swallowing.

Look at Picasso. O’Neill. Tennessee Williams. Capote. Were these shiny happy people spreading sunshine? No. Only the greatest of personal demons can force you to do powerful work.

...the deepest secrets about ourselves that we, in the ultimate act of humanity, will spare those we truly love.

God, the boring relative everyone ignores—no one calls, no one writes—until they need a serious favor.

People had an illogical, self-serving rationale when it came to interpreting the behavior of others.

Within every elaborate lie, a kernel of truth.

It's funny how the night that changes your life forever starts out like all the others.

Life was a freight train barreling toward just one stop, our loved ones streaking past our windows in blurs of color and light. There was no holding on to any of it, and no slowing it down.

It felt as if we'd been to war together. Deep in a jungle, alone, I had relied on them, these strangers. They'd held me up in ways only people could. When it was over, an ending never felt like an ending, only an exhausted draw, we went our separate ways. Be we were bonded forever by the history of it, the simple fact they'd seen the raw side of me and me of them, a side no one, not even closest friends or family had ever seen before, or probably ever would.

To be next to her was to have everything.

There was something about her playing... a knowledge of darkness in the most extreme form.

But when you flee someone, no matter how far you roam, that person will follow you as doggedly as the stars.