There Will Be Lies

There are things that, when they break, they keep on functioning, just in some other, lesser way. Like an elevator: it breaks, and it's a room. An escalator: it breaks, and it's stairs The heart is the same. It breaks, and you might not even notice, because you still feel things, you still have emotions. But there's a dimension missing, like for the elevator; it still works as a room, but it has lost its vertical axis of motion, and it's the same with a heart: it breaks, and yeah, you can still have feelings, you can still feel sorry for someone, or angry, or sad, but there's something that's lost, a motion, a dimension. It breaks, and it's just an organ, beating.

What is with people who don't read novels? I mean, what kind of life is that?

Every generation that goes into your genes is a generation of fighters, of survivors. And all those millions of lives are in you, in your blood.

...she took away my yesterdays. But that's OK. Because now I am a person made of tomorrows.

Reading is awesome. Just escaping into someone else's life, into another world. In books, everything is possible.

I have a tingly feeling that I get when there are books all around me. The library! I know it's geeky, but I love it. Just sitting between the shelves of books, reading - it's the safest feeling.

Something can be moving in one direction, smoothly, swiftly, something like a ball, or, oh, say, A LIFE, and then a bat swings, at the perfect moment, swings true, and hits that something, and it constricts...And its energy is reversed, and it fires off in the opposite direction, completely the other way to what has been, to what seems meant to be...But here's the lesson: The ball—the life, whatever—is STILL THERE. The energy hasn't destroyed it, the impact, the explosion, hasn't erased it from the world. It still exists, it's just in a different place altogether. A place it didn't expect to end up in...All the time, when I batted, I felt like it was meditation, like it was control. Like, swinging the bat at the perfect time, before you even see the ball—like that was a metaphor for something, for some kind of Zen peacefulness. What I didn't realize was: I got the metaphor wrong. I was not the bat. I was the ball. THAT—that is the lesson of the batting cage.

You are descended from warriors. An endless parade of warriors. You have been alive for a billion years, an unbroken line of DNA. You will not be defeated by a ditch.

No one is too old for fairy tales.

There will be two lies. Then there will be the truth. And that will be the hardest of all.

When guys in black Cadillacs drive you to some random building and lock you in what amounts to a cell, you know that shit just got real.

It is easier to trick with charm than with aggression.

But here's the thing: The something new, it isn't necessarily bad. In fact, in some ways, maybe it's better.

I’m going to be hit by a car in about four hours, but I don’t know that yet. The weird thing is, it’s not the car that’s going to kill me, that’s going to erase me from the world. It’s something totally different. Something that happens eight days from now and threatens to end everything. My name is Shelby Jane Cooper—is, was, whatever. I’m seventeen years old when the car crash happens. This is my story.