The Six Rules of Maybe

I shouldn't have to be a liar to make someone love me. I shouldn't be so afraid of losing someone that I'll do anything to make them stay.

If letting go, if letting people and things work themselves out in the way that they needed to without your help was the most important thing, then it was also the hardest.

Things that came apart could be put together again, but never exactly the same.

You can want one thing and have a secret wish for its opposite.

The six rules of maybe 1. respect the power of hope and possibilites. Begin with beleif. Hold onto it. 2. If you known where you want to go, you're already half way there. Know what you desire but, more imporantly, why you desire it. Then go. 3. hopes and dreams and heart's desires require a clear path-get out of your own way 4. Place hope carefully in your own hands and in the hands of others 5. Persist, if necessary 6. That said, most importantly-know when you've reached an end, Quit, give up, do it with courage. Giving up is not failing-it's the chance to begin again.

You were supposed to have hope, right? You were supposed to respect its power and hold on. And so I did. I held, and held, and let hope fill me. But as the days went on, it seemed I could be holding for a long, long time. Hope could be the most powerful thing or the most useless

I would have spoken, had my heart not been in my throat

The hope was, people like me got to finally find our place in college or in the actual world. People who understood this told you that high school wasn't the actual world, that it was more like a temporary alternate reality you were forced to believe in for four years. A video game you played, where you could never get to the next level no matter how hard you tried.

You can hold a secret, hold it so far in that it drives nearly every thought and every move you make- your very heartbeat, almost.

What is it about hairdressers? You tell them 'not too short' and some part of their hairdresser brain hears this as 'whack the shit out of it.' If you never say, 'not too short,' everything is fine. You say it, & it's a guarantee you'll come out ready for the military>

You've got to say what you mean and mean what you say...Doubt in your voice is an open door people will shove right through.

I've wished for things and never really had the chance...It's time to stop dreaming and do something about it. You've got to know what you want, then...go.

Sometimes you're sure dogs have some secret, superior intelligence, and other times you know they're only their simple, goofy selves.

I'd always thought telling the truth to other people was hard, but maybe that was a snap compared to telling the truth to yourself. Sometimes we just refused to know what we knew.

My subconscious speaks in a foreign language.

No one is ever quite as strong or as weak as you'd think.

A person who says "it's your decision" is informing you that your decision sucks.

Maybe we all just wanted someone to believe in. That's all each of us wanted, and it should be so simple, but it never was simple.

Being needed was a handy trick. It could fill you up so full you never even noticed all the places that were empty.

You could try and understand people, you could read books and understand words and concepts and ideas, but you could never understand enough or have enough knowledge to keep away the surprises that both fate and human beings had in store.

A lot of life is just surviving what happens.

It was possible, maybe, to have facts in your mind that weren't facts at all. You could build a whole life's story on false assumptions. You could make truths out of untruths and untruths out of truths. Until you spoke them, really said them out loud or checked for sure, you may not have known which were which.

I had let want in, opened the door ever so slightly. But want without the belief you can get what you want is pointless. You have to hope, so I let that in too. You have to. To want things and go for them and believe, even in impossible situations...Hope was what you had when you had nothing else. Hope was the perfect shiny top on the Christmas tree, the glowing halo of every wish, the endless beacon of a lighthouse bringing tormented ships home at last.

Control was just wishful thinking, and you controlled things to hedge your bets, to be safe, to guard against loss.

Most of our parents wanted the best for us, I knew, but we also wanted the best for them.

so what brings you to the doctor today?" "hmm, im afraid i have the chronic desire to save people" "i know about that. i've got it too. maybe it's catching." "not catching enough

Truth was funny, because it was an insistent thing, maybe as powerful and insistent as some force of nature, the push of water or wind. You could keep it out only so long, but it had its own will and its own needs, and maybe you could keep it at bay with lies, but not for long, not for always.

She'd be one of those parents who left a kid behind at a rest stop, driving for miles before she noticed. We'd hear about her on the evening news.

It was practically un-American to not set goals and then do everything you could, everything, to reach them. Quitting-it was a dirty word...