“I want to change my punctuation. I long for exclamation marks, but I'm drowning in ellipses.”
“In my mind I am eloquent; I can climb intricate scaffolds of words to reach the highest cathedral ceilings and paint my thoughts. But when I open my mouth, everything collapses.”
“You should always be taking pictures, if not with a camera then with your mind. Memories you capture on purpose are always more vivid than the ones you pick up by accident.”
“There is no ideal world for you to wait around for. The world is always just what it is now, and it's up to you how you respond to it.”
“What wonderful thing didn't start out scary?”
“Writing isn't letters on paper. It's communication. It's memory.”
“I am Dead, but it's not so bad. I've learned to live with it.”
“It frustrates and fascinates me that we'll never know for sure, that despite the best efforts of historians and scientists and poets, there are some things we'll just never know. What the first song sounded like. How it felt to see the first photograph. Who kissed the first kiss, and if it was any good.”
“We are where we are, however we got here. What matters is where we go next.”
“My friend "M" says the irony of being a zombie is that everything is funny, but you can't smile, because your lips have rotted off.”
“I crush her against me. I want to be part of her. Not just inside her but all around her. I want our rib cages to crack open and our hearts to migrate and merge. I want our cells to braid together like living thread.”
“Once you've arrived at the end of the world, it hardly matters which route you took.”
“...wanting change is step one, but step two is taking it.”
“We smile, because this is how we save the world.”
“The past is made out of facts... I guess the future is just hope.”
“What a massive responsibility, being a moral creature”
“There's no benchmark for how life's "supposed" to happen. There is no ideal world for you to wait around for. The world is always just what it is now, it's up to you how you respond to it.”
“What's wrong with people?" she says, almost too quiet for me to hear. "Were they born with parts missing or did it fall out somewhere along the way?”
“We're fumbling in the dark, but at least we're in motion.”
“But it does make me sad that we've forgotten our names. Out of everything, this seems to me the most tragic. I miss my own and I mourn for everyone else's, because I'd like to love them, but I don't know who they are.”
“Here it comes. My inevitable death, ignoring me all those years when I wished for it daily, arriving only after I've decided I want to live forever.”
“I can feel it... the chance to start over, to live right, to love right, to burn up in a fiery cloud and never again be buried in the mud.”
“There is a chasm between me and the world outside of me. A gap so wide my feelings can't cross it. By the time my screams reach the other side, they have dwindled into groans.”
“If there are rules, we're the ones making them. We can change them whenever we want to.”
“Music? Music is life! It’s physical emotion - you can touch it! It’s neon ecto-energy sucked out of spirits and switched into sound waves for your ears to swallow. Are you telling me, what, that it’s boring? You don’t have time for it?”
“I'm watching her talk. Watching her jaw move and collecting her words one by one as they spill from her lips. I don't deserve them. Her warm memories. I'd like to paint them over the bare plaster walls of my soul, but everything I paint seems to peel.”
“But I'm not afraid of the skeletons in Julie's closet. I look forward to meeting the rest of them, looking them hard in the eye, giving them firm, bone-crunching handshakes.”
“What I'm saying is, when you have weight like that in your life, you have to start looking for the bigger picture or you are gonna sink.”
“What's the point of trying to fix a world we're so briefly in?”
“All the shitty stuff people do to themselves... it can all be the same thing, you know? Just a way to drown out your own voice. To kill your memories without having to kill yourself.”
“Faith is a strange creature,” Schuster said. “Like a falcon that nests year after year in the same place, but then flies away, sometimes for years, only to return again, stronger than ever.”
“That doesn’t matter. Gorky’s a vain man. We must bind him with cables to the Party,” replied Stalin.3 It worked: during the kulak liquidation, Gorky unleashed his hatred of the backward peasants in Pravda: “If the enemy does not surrender, he must be exterminated.” He toured concentration camps and admired their re-educational value. He supported slave labour projects such as the Belomor Canal which he visited with Yagoda, whom he congratulated: “You rough fellows do not realize what great work you’re doing!”4 Yagoda,”
“The enemy of my enemy may be my friend … of course the friend of my friend is often a jerk.”
“The Big Bang model seems like a fairly natural picture, once you believe in an approximately uniform universe that is expanding in time. Just wind the clock backward, and you get a hot, dense beginning. Indeed, the basic framework was put together in the late 1920s by Georges Lemaître, a Catholic priest from Belgium”
“A man who is a man goes on until he can go no further—and then goes twice as far.”
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