When the World Tips Over

I do believe now that when the world tips over, joy spills out with all the sorrows. But you have to look for it.

If people bear the trauma of their ancestors, doesn’t it follow that they also bear their rhapsodies? If there is generational pain passed down, mustn’t there also be generational joy? If there are family curses that drop through time, mustn’t there also be family blessings that do the same?

I learn in this moment that love doesn't go away when people do.

A real love story is not falling in love once, but again and again through all sorts of incarnations.

I read novels, no, not read, I tear them open and crawl inside them and hide in between the words.

I think in this moment how maybe I’m always all the girls I’ve ever been, how the now-me is just all the old-mes thrown together.

All women write stories. It’s just that only some transcribe them.

There’s an invisible artery joining the hearts of mothers and daughters through which pain is transferred from one generation to the next.

If only we could have joys without sorrows, blessings without curses.

Sometimes platonic loves are the most profound.

Music was never a noun for you, it was always a verb. The only verb. You music-ed through the days and nights of your life.

hiraeth. She’s said it was a Welsh word that meant homesickness for a home you can never return to or that never was.

Maybe you can't hang on to people, but my, how we hang on to our love for them, or it hangs on to us.

She didn't know people could stop loving you. She'd thought friendship was permanent, like matter.

The dawn light’s swimming through the trees, making the leaves gleam. A glisk, I think, tattooed on my wrist, maybe my favourite word of all. Because ultimately and ideally, isn’t that what life is: a fleeting glance at a glittering sight.

Well-known fact: Life was a soggy sock you can’t take off.

Are stories prayers? Invitations? Mirrors? Storms? Or maybe they're homes.

Still, she was crazy about these two flickering men and wanted to be just like them with someone, except alive and not mute, though perhaps they spoke ghost-language to each other, and she couldn't hear it. She also loved their best friend, an older female ghost who wore men's clothes and ran barefoot through the vineyards, her red hair spun with flowers and bil- lowing behind her like a red river of fresh blooms. "Hey guys," she called out to the floating men. "Do you know anything about angels?" But of course she got no answer. They were mid-kiss, midair, entwined and enraptured as always. Their eternity was only each other.

Do you follow your destiny or your heart when they aren’t one and the same? Which pull is stronger?

Like the white spaces on a page. I think we have those same white spaces in our lives, where the untold parts are.

He was weird. He knew this. He suspected he was in the wrong body, family, town, species, that there'd been some big cosmic mix-up. Like maybe he was supposed to be a tree or a barn owl or a prime number. He only found himself, his real self, in novels, not even in the stories and characters, but in the sentences, the lone words.

It's very hard to unbelieve stuff from when you were little, isn't it? So hard to shake off the stories we were raised on.

I’m not built for long-term romance. But you are my long-term unromance, my dearest friend, my family.

She burned her shoes, her corsets, anything that restrained her, and would spend the rest of her life in trousers, untethered, and most important to her, autonomous, soul-single, a wondrous one-ly woman.

Find the people who plant the sun in your chest.

Life really becomes an accumulation of losses, but this is something I hope you never have to learn.

It’s the kind of memory you want to hang a hammock inside, so you can return to it in times like these and stretch out in it.

Nemophilist." She said to Miles. "One who loves forests, trees in number. A haunter of woods. From the ancient Greek. Kickass word, right?" "Right." Miles said, thinking he might die of happiness from learning this word.

At the risk of sounding weird, I'm pretty sure my spirit or soul or whatever is a pile of words. Sometimes I don't even read in order, just read some from one book, some from another, whatever, all night long. Like all- and I mean all of everything- is just one really long story.