“I'm ready to lose myself,
but I'm not ready to lose you.
I'm ready to find myself,
But I'm not ready for you to know what I find.”
“You can be naked with someone and remain unknowable. You can be someone's secret without ever knowing what the full secret is. You can know he's even more scared than you are, but that doesn't make you any less scared yourself.”
“The thing about possibilities: there are some you want much more than others. Or only one you want much more than everything else.”
“You're becoming. You're in the process of becoming. You just don't know what yet.
That felt right. It felt okay to stop there, for now, as we walked through the future.”
“Would you really fight for him?" I nod.
But the nod isn't enough, so I go on.
"In fact, I would tear through rubble with my bare hands to get to him. I would lift cars. I would wrestle down anyone who said we shouldn't be together. I would stare down life and kick it in the ass if I had to. Because if you want to know the truth -- if you really want to know the truth -- none of that could be nearly as hard as being in love with him and not being able to tell anyone about it. Including him. I have this thing inside me, and it's angry and it's scared and it's uncertain and most of all it's so completely in love with him, and it would do anything to keep him, even if it means things staying the way they are now.”
“And then she is kissing me, right here on the sidewalk on a foggy summer night. Violet is kissing me, and everything is perfect. The kiss doesn't end. We are not two girls on a polite first date, bestowing a customary good-night peck.
No.
We are kissing like girls who have ached for each other for years who never even spoke but somehow exchanged I love yous anyway.”
“As that famous homosexual Winston Churchill once said, if you find yourself heartbroken, keep walking.”
“I hate that word. Straight. At the very least, those of us who are nonstraight should get called curvy. Or scenic. Actually, I like that: 'Do you think she's straight?' 'Oh no. She's scenic”
“From the top of Castro Street, it looks like a river of people. It looks, I realize, like a march - rows and rows of people, gathered to exert their power. Only this time we aren't marching. We don't need to show our numbers to show our worth. This time our power comes from staying in this space, from walking the hallowed ground of our history and bringing it to life. I am alone, yes. But I am a part of everything. I feel it - I've been living in a world, but what I have is a universe.”
“No more looking at a wall and pretending it's a mirror. No more shelving fiction in the non-fiction section. No more thinking I could get away with it.”
“You've never told him", Violet says. It's not a question. It's obvious.
"I tell him all the time - I just make sure it's never when he's listening. I say it when he's in the other room, or when he's asleep, or when the music's really loud. Sometimes he asks me what I just said. And I tell him never mind. Or I make up something else, something that isn't 'I love you'.”
“He's not doing it to hurt me. I have to believe that. He's doing it to make himself happy which just happens to hurt me.”
“I just want all my friends to be happy. And sometimes you have to do that one friend at a time.”
“The heart is a treacherous beast, but it means well.”
“I am shy. Sometimes painfully shy. And it's especially painful when someone reminds me about it.”
“I'm sorry I left without telling you," she says. "I wasn't ready. I wanted it so much, and I wasn't ready for that.”
“I wonder what would happen if I stopped walking, if I let the crowd fill up the space between us. Would he notice? Would he wade back to find me? Or would he keep going, because forward is his destination and I am not?”
“Friendship is about more than facts. It's about knowing what someone is thinking, or knowing enough to know that you don't. But I guess it's also about not letting too much time go by without asking them questions, so you don't end up looking at them one afternoon, the sun so bright you have to squint, realizing that you hardly recognize the person they've become.”
“When you're friends with someone for such a long, it's easy to feel like she belongs to you, like the version of the person you became friends with is the only version.”
“the heart is a treacherous beast”
“And we step off the curb, all of us together, as if to say: Here we come. Through hard days and good ones, through despair and through exhilaration, in love and out of love, for just now or for forever. Here we come. It's our parade.”
“You're never going to be ready"..."Don't you see that? You have to forget about ready. If you don't, you're always going to run away”
“It's about what I know is true. Because I'm looking at this bright red storm of color on a canvas, at all my delicate lines and passionate brushstrokes. I'm looking at something so urgent and true, so far beyond what I thought I was capable of making.”
“This is my game within our game—to try to come up with the scenario in which it would work out better. Maybe if I met him now. Maybe if I met him in college. After college. Once he's comfortable with who he is. But every time I do this, I feel awful. Because I'm sacrificing our history. I don't love him for who he is now. I wouldn't love him for who he is two years from now. I love him for all the hims he's already been with me. I guess that's the contradiction. I want a fresh start. I would fight for that fresh start. But I also want it to be a continuation.”
“Empathy is wonderful, but you can still overdose on it if you try too much to fast.”
“A maioria das vidas é longa, e a maioria das dores é curta. Os corações não se partem de verdade, eles sempre continuam batendo”
“When you're friends with someone for such a long time, it's easy to feel like she belongs to you, like the version of the person you became friends with is the only real version. If she hated peas when she was a kid then she will always hate peas, and if she starts to eat them and declare them delicious, really she is deluding herself, masking her hatred of them, trying to pretend she's someone she's not.”
“I swore I wouldn't check my phone, and now that I've broken that vow it's like the other ones are null and void. Like any addict, I've built my floodgates out of tissue paper.”
“I hate that would. Straight. At the very least, those of us who are nonstraight should get to be called curvy. Or scenic. Actually, I like that: 'Do you think she's straight?' 'Oh no. She's scenic.”
“Being with the wrong person is lonelier than being on your own. Or it’s as lonely, in a different way,”
“Cuando cruzamos el puente examiné la inscripción de Shigeru me había leído en su día: "El clan Otori da la bienvenida a los justos y los leales. Que los injustos y los desleales sean precavidos". "Los injustos y desleales". Como yo. Desleal a Shigeru, quien me había legado sus tierras; tan injusto como los miembros de la tribu, injusto y cruel.”
“Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea," translated Florent. "By Jules Verne. This book I have not read in many years."
"We're reading it in French class," Joseph said. "It's hard to understand, but I found a line that Uncle Albert would love."
Florent opened to a dog-eared page where Joseph had underlined a sentence and written the translation in the margin. Florent read it out loud. "'Let me tell you, Professor, that you will not regret the time spent on board. You are going to travel in a a land of marvels.”
“I have a theory that life is gathering the raw materials, and when we die, we get to make patterns out of our lives and relive them in whatever order we want. That way I can spend forever repeating the days when I was really happy, and never have to experience any of the sad days. So that's how you live a really great life. You make sure you have enough good days that you want to go back to.”
“They never pried, but it took him weeks to realize they didn't have to. They didn't ask for secrets; they settled for the breadcrumb truths of day to day life. They knew he hated vegetables but loved fruit, that his favorite color was gray, and that he didn't like movies or loud music. They were things Neil understood only in terms of survival, but his teammates hoarded these insights like gold. They were piecing Neil together and building a real person around all of his lies. They found the parts of him no disguise could change.”
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