“ I've been taught that love is beautiful and kind, but it isn't like that at all. It is beautiful, but it's a terrible beauty, a ruthless one, and you fall-you fall, and the thing is-
The thing is you want to. You don't care what's coming you just want who your heart beats for.”
― Elizabeth Scott, quote from The Unwritten Rule
“There are a million rules for being a girl. There are a million things you have to do to get through each day. High school has things that can trip you up, ruin you, people say one thing and mean another, and you have to know all the rules, you have to know what you can and can't do.”
― Elizabeth Scott, quote from The Unwritten Rule
“I liked him first, but it doesn't matter. I still like him. That doesn't matter either. Or at least, it's not supposed to.”
― Elizabeth Scott, quote from The Unwritten Rule
“I wants us to be real. I want to be just you and me.
- Ryan”
― Elizabeth Scott, quote from The Unwritten Rule
“It was like we were all so busy trying to be happy or saying we were happy, but underneath there was nothing but bitterness, the kind that could only be bled out in ink, in unspoken word.”
― Elizabeth Scott, quote from The Unwritten Rule
“love is...you get confused and you do stuff you don't mean to do-and you just-you hate yourself and sometimes you don't even want to love the person you do because it would be so much easier if you didn't.But you just-you just do.”
― Elizabeth Scott, quote from The Unwritten Rule
“I’m broken, I have cut myself wide open. I can see my heart and it is not what I believed it was, it is not good and kind and all the things I have always thought I am.”
― Elizabeth Scott, quote from The Unwritten Rule
“And what if---what are you if the people who are supposed to love you can leave you like you're nothing?”
― Elizabeth Scott, quote from The Unwritten Rule
“I know who I want to be with, and it isn't her.
- Ryan”
― Elizabeth Scott, quote from The Unwritten Rule
“All the things I've thought about love are true. It's beautiful and terrible and it doesn't make things perfect. It ends things, and it brings beginnings.
This is mine.”
― Elizabeth Scott, quote from The Unwritten Rule
“Imagine a guy. He’s a little taller than you, with perfect skin, skin that just screams “touch me!” and dark hair and gorgeous blue eyes and he looks so sweet and he is sweet. And then have him blush a little.”
― Elizabeth Scott, quote from The Unwritten Rule
“I'm so not interesting in having to try and make something out of foil."
What, you didn't like the poncho with wraparound leggings?"
It was beyond hideou- wait a minute. You watch that show?"
My mom loves it."
But your suppose to be sulking in the basement getting ready to light fires."
What can I say? I'm a failure as a teenager. I watch TV with my mom.”
― Elizabeth Scott, quote from The Unwritten Rule
“I wish it had never happened because then I wouldn't think about it as I'm falling asleep.”
― Elizabeth Scott, quote from The Unwritten Rule
“I’m always the one who doesn’t have a date, the one guys walk up to and say, “So, is your friend, you know, with someone?” and I may not be the only girl without someone, but it feels like it sometimes. A lot of the time.”
― Elizabeth Scott, quote from The Unwritten Rule
“..."Are you okay?" he says, still looking at me, and I feel my smile slip, fade, and the silence that falls over us then is so total I can’t hear anything, not the rush-hiss of my heart pounding in my chest, not the sounds all around us; insects, wind, and the distant clatter of others’ lives in houses built close but not too close because when we look out our windows we all like to pretend that everything we see is ours. But Ryan is not mine.”
― Elizabeth Scott, quote from The Unwritten Rule
“I knew from Brianna that being beautiful wasn’t all great. Brianna had changed in middle school. One day we were both seventh graders and the next, she was a supermodel who had a seventh grader for a best friend.”
― Elizabeth Scott, quote from The Unwritten Rule
“This is what happiness is, past the rubbish of its overuse as a word, past the cracked gloss of the letters that mean nothing when strung together. They mean something now, and I know what it’s like when you and someone else are right together. How simple it is, and how amazing.”
― Elizabeth Scott, quote from The Unwritten Rule
“It's been hard for me at times...the responsibility and expectation that comes with being a leader. I'm not always the one I wish I could be, that I should be, but nonetheless, it is my place. If I were to ever show a commitment to something other than my leadership, which could jeopardize the function I have, I would be risking too many lives. I couldn't live with that.”
― Jessica Shirvington, quote from Enticed
“She's not stupid. She just never lets her mind out.”
― Diana Wynne Jones, quote from House of Many Ways
“Once upon a time, there lived a boy and a girl. The boy was eighteen and the girl sixteen. He was not unusually handsome, and she was not especially beautiful. They were just an ordinary lonely boy and an ordinary lonely girl, like all the others. But they believed with their whole hearts that somewhere in the world there lived the 100% perfect boy and the 100% perfect girl for them. Yes, they believed in a miracle. And that miracle actually happened.
One day the two came upon each other on the corner of a street.
“This is amazing,” he said. “I’ve been looking for you all my life. You may not believe this, but you’re the 100% perfect girl for me.”
“And you,” she said to him, “are the 100% perfect boy for me, exactly as I’d pictured you in every detail. It’s like a dream.”
They sat on a park bench, held hands, and told each other their stories hour after hour. They were not lonely anymore. They had found and been found by their 100% perfect other. What a wonderful thing it is to find and be found by your 100% perfect other. It’s a miracle, a cosmic miracle.
As they sat and talked, however, a tiny, tiny sliver of doubt took root in their hearts: Was it really all right for one’s dreams to come true so easily?
And so, when there came a momentary lull in their conversation, the boy said to the girl, “Let’s test ourselves - just once. If we really are each other’s 100% perfect lovers, then sometime, somewhere, we will meet again without fail. And when that happens, and we know that we are the 100% perfect ones, we’ll marry then and there. What do you think?”
“Yes,” she said, “that is exactly what we should do.”
And so they parted, she to the east, and he to the west.
The test they had agreed upon, however, was utterly unnecessary. They should never have undertaken it, because they really and truly were each other’s 100% perfect lovers, and it was a miracle that they had ever met. But it was impossible for them to know this, young as they were. The cold, indifferent waves of fate proceeded to toss them unmercifully.
One winter, both the boy and the girl came down with the season’s terrible inluenza, and after drifting for weeks between life and death they lost all memory of their earlier years. When they awoke, their heads were as empty as the young D. H. Lawrence’s piggy bank.
They were two bright, determined young people, however, and through their unremitting efforts they were able to acquire once again the knowledge and feeling that qualified them to return as full-fledged members of society. Heaven be praised, they became truly upstanding citizens who knew how to transfer from one subway line to another, who were fully capable of sending a special-delivery letter at the post office. Indeed, they even experienced love again, sometimes as much as 75% or even 85% love.
Time passed with shocking swiftness, and soon the boy was thirty-two, the girl thirty.
One beautiful April morning, in search of a cup of coffee to start the day, the boy was walking from west to east, while the girl, intending to send a special-delivery letter, was walking from east to west, but along the same narrow street in the Harajuku neighborhood of Tokyo. They passed each other in the very center of the street. The faintest gleam of their lost memories glimmered for the briefest moment in their hearts. Each felt a rumbling in their chest. And they knew:
She is the 100% perfect girl for me.
He is the 100% perfect boy for me.
But the glow of their memories was far too weak, and their thoughts no longer had the clarity of fouteen years earlier. Without a word, they passed each other, disappearing into the crowd. Forever.
A sad story, don’t you think?”
― Haruki Murakami, quote from The Elephant Vanishes
“But I am not going to give every detail. Some things lose their fragrance when opened to the air, and there are stirrings of the soul which cannot be put into words without destroying their delicacy.”
― Thérèse de Lisieux, quote from Story of a Soul: The Autobiography of St. Therese of Lisieux
“The Garden is a metaphor for the following: our minds, and our thinking in terms of pairs of opposites--man and woman, good and evil--are as holy as that of a god. (50)”
― Joseph Campbell, quote from Thou Art That: Transforming Religious Metaphor
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