“It was strange how words meant something when they came out of your mouth. Inside your head they were safe and silent, but once they were outside, people grabbed hold of them.”
“Sometimes if you want something badly enough, you can make it happen. If you miss someone so desperately that it wrecks your insides, you say their name over and over until you conjure then. It's called sympathetic magic and you just have to believe in it to make it work.”
“If you want a girl to like you, you have to listen like a woman and love like a man.”
“Statement: A girl and a boy jump into a river. The boy swims over to the girl and says, "God, it's cold."
Question: What's the probability they will kiss?”
“Do you want this to be a love story?”
“I like you," he said.
He made it sound as if she was bound to disagree with him. She nodded. His face said he was telling her something very important.
He said, "I mean it. Whatever happens, you have to believe that.”
“Is this how it is for everyone?' she whispered.
'No.'
'How do you know?'
'I just do. I've never felt this with anyone before.'
'Serious?'
'Serious. That isn't a line.'
'Kiss me,' she said.
He did. Everywhere.”
“Was this love? Because it hurt. It was like a bit of glass stuck somewhere important - his heart or his head, and it was throbbing.”
“When I first saw Ellie, I knew it was her-- she was my fantasy. I didn't want it to be true, but every time I met her it was obvious, and the funny thing was that she was better than the fantasy, like I got more stuff than I'd imagined.”
“Parents don’t know their children at all.
No one knows anyone, in fact.”
“The last few weeks, it was as if someone had taken his life to pieces and let him see the way it worked.”
“Funny how when life was that simple, you never really realized how lucky you were.”
“You changed the rules of the universe when you fell in love with the enemy.”
“Help me, Mikey, she wanted to say. I’m afraid. More afraid than you’d ever believe.’ And he’d take her hand and they’d fly across the rooftops and up into space and sit on some planet and watch a double sunrise or maybe a star being born or some other event that no human had ever seen, her head on his shoulder, his arm around her. And she’d tell him everything.”
“She needed food. Diets didn't count in a crisis.”
“Every breath, every heartbeat, was one less until maybe things stopped hurting this much.”
“We'll kill him on the green with a five iron.”
“Alchemy, Dex called it, which was something to do with magic if you were French.”
“When he thought about her, he remembered her at the cottage, her eyes fiery, daring to love him. But standing here in front of him , she looked defeated and sad.”
“She wishes she was old. She'd swap her life to be in a life that was nearly over, so long as she didn't have to be here.”
“Why do I feel like you're not on my side anymore? Please don't give up on me.”
“A sword and a shotgun lay across brackets in the wall, the rhinestones that covered them glittering under the overhanging lightbulb. Ethan startled.”
“Fruit fly scientists, God bless ‘em, are the big exceptions. Morgan’s team always picked sensibly descriptive names for mutant genes, like ‘speck,’ ‘beaded,’ ‘rudimentary,’ ‘white,’ and ‘abnormal.’ And this tradition continues today, as the names of most fruit fly genes eschew jargon and even shade whimsical… The ‘turnip’ gene makes flies stupid. ‘Tudor’ leaves males (as with Henry VIII) childless. ‘Cleopatra’ can kill flies when it interacts with another gene, ‘asp.’ ‘Cheap date’ leaves flies exceptionally tipsy after a sip of alcohol… And thankfully, this whimsy with names has inspired the occasional zinger in other areas of genetics… The backronym for the “POK erythroid myeloid ontogenic” gene in mice—‘pokemon’—nearly provoked a lawsuit, since the ‘pokemon’ gene (now known, sigh, as ‘zbtb7’) contributes to the spread of cancer, and the lawyers for the Pokemon media empire didn’t want their cute little pocket monsters confused with tumors.”
“Ever since the dawn of civilization, people have not been content to see events as unconnected and inexplicable. They have craved an understanding of the underlying order in the world. Today we still yearn to know why we are here and where we came from. Humanity's deepest desire for knowledge is justification enough for our continuing quest. And our goal is nothing less than a complete description of the universe we live in.”
“The teams followed her from the third-floor railing to the nearby Electronic Learning Center. All the video games and flight simulators were dark. The arcade was eerily quiet. Kyle noticed something new in what had always been his favorite room in the library: One whole wall was covered, floor to ceiling, with a panoramic (but blank) video screen. As Kyle squinted at the wide swath of shiny white, he noticed a series of evenly spaced glowing green LEDs at eye level on the wall.”
“That was the first important discovery I made about Betty: she was desperately isolated, and she survived this isolation only by virtue of the sustaining myth that her intimate life was being lived elsewhere. Her friends, her circle of acquaintances, were not here, but elsewhere, in New York, in Texas, in the past. In fact, everything of importance was elsewhere. It was at this time that I first began to suspect that for Betty there was no “here” there.”
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