“Because I think that sometimes, when you really love somebody, you don't ask them for the kind of compromise that is actually a sacrifice. The kind where one person gives up everything they have, everything they are, just so they can be with the other person. And you certainly don't expect that shit. You don't expect someone to prove their love. To love you that little bit more than you love them.”
“Can I have this?" Iris asked in her honeydew voice, holding up one of the novels I'd brought her so that Amy could see the cover.
"Sorry, hot man is all out at the moment. We have some corpulent taxi driver and a slice of crazy cat-lady left, but we ran out of hot man hours ago.”
“...But I don't want you to be afraid to take risks. If it's worth it...If the person in his eyes is the person you want to be, the person you know you could be...then don't be scared...”
“My fingers scrabbled at the smooth leather interior of Ryu’s BMW as he missed the exit we needed. Causing him to drop a few more F bombs and slam on the breaks. He then opened what I assume was a rift in the space time continuum in order to hurtle his German made steal cage of doom through said continuum.”
“I don't know whether it's because I don't love him, or because I can't love him for demanding something like that from me. Or because he doesn't know me for squat. But I couldn't give him my whole life. And that's what he wanted from me. He wanted everything, and I wanted him to love me for what I had already offered.”
“I was engineered for comfort, not speed.”
“Why should a deal breaker for you be an acceptable compromise for me?”
“I shrieked incoherent, made up swear words as the pain stopped messing bent me over, and made me its bitch”
“I muscled through the moment with my usual delicacy.”
“So, like, Zeus was just some great big preternatural baby-daddy?”
“It doesn't matter if people are playing jazz or writing poetry -- if they want to be successful, they need to learn how to persist and persevere, how to keep on working until the work is done. Woody Allen famously declared that "eighty percent of success is showing up." NOCCA (New Orleans Center for the Creative Arts) teaches kids how to show up again and again.”
“Each one of us continues to carry the heart of each self we've ever been, at every stage along the way, and a chaos of everything good and rotten. And we have to carry this weight all alone, through each day that we live. We try to be as nice as we can to the people we love, but we alone support the weight of ourselves.”
“You're so optimistic. It's not what I expected from a vigilante who calls himself Black Knife."
"Well, I considered Optimistic Knife, but I didn't think anyone would take it seriously.”
“There's a word in Portuguese that my dad wrote about in one of his books: saudade.
It's the sadness you feel for something that isn't gone yet, but will be. The sadness of lost causes. The sadness of being alive.”
“Their electronics are still back in the Stone Age.”
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