The thing with love is, you cannot choose who you fall for. Falling in love often happens at the wrong time, in the wrong place, with the wrong person. Just as much as you cannot stop growing feelings for a certain man, there's no switch to turn off ...
That first shrink I saw when I got back to Clayton Falls told me no one is a lost cause, but I think that’s bullshit. I think people can be so crushed, so broken, that they’ll never be anything more than a fragment of a whole person.
The faculty of memory cannot be separated from the imagination. They go hand in hand. To one degree or another, we all invent our personal pasts. And for most of us those pasts are built from emotionally colored memories.
We watched some of the movie. It was shocking. Sex is apparently hard labor. Various persons supported crushing weights in agonizing positions for what seemed like endless blocks of time. Exhausted men grunted and toiled like movers trying to get a r...
There was no more meaningless phrase in all of language than "Cheer up!" The only way to get someone to cheer up was to help them forget, and saying "cheer up" had quite the opposite effect, only reminding the person why he or she was depressed in th...
It still hurts, but life is supposed to hurt. Too many people think life is supposed to be easy and perfect all the time. But there is always some hurt. It's part of being alive. You have to accept it's a piece that every single person carries. It's ...
The neurologist had dismissed her case after a single visit, handing out an easy nostrum by telling her father that if she continued to write poetry, she would be all right.
Phineas created an atmosphere in which I continued now to live, a way of sizing up the world with erratic and entirely personal reservations, letting its rocklike facts sift through and be accepted only a little at a time, only as much as he could as...
It was the best first kiss in the history of first kisses. It was as sweet as sugar. And it was warm, as warm as pie. The whole world opened up and I fell inside. I don't know where I was, but I didn't care. I didn't care because the only person who ...
She could hardly believe what she was hearing. How could the man who had taken her from her home—the person she had trusted with her safety, her life, her whole future—suddenly abandon her, and expect her to fend for herself in a foreign kingdom?
Public transit situates us so that we are given license to accept what's right in front of us, but will likely arouse our desire to compare our narrative to someone else's, to give ourselves permission to speculate upon a person's private space, or l...
...through reading, the modern man succeeds in obtaining an "escape from time" comparable to the "emegence from time" effected by myths. (...) Reading projects him out if his personal duration and incorporates him into other rythms, makes him live in...
There’s no glory in this whole shit. No war is ever glorious. Heroes are usually dead. Besides, they rarely turn into heroes because they are super-humans, but because of circumstances. Heroes rarely think. Heroes just act. So, all this is, is a st...
...There is a tale, as old as the Ancient Ones themselves, that one would arise who has that gift: to sing all the chantments, the high notes and the low, the swift rhythms and the slow. And this person would be more powerful than even the Ancient On...
Our mind is who we are; it’s where we feel and think and believe. It’s where we have love and hate and faith and passion.’ I was getting a little embarrassed by your earnestness but you continued, ‘How can someone hope to treat another person...
But, astonishingly, I'm not broken. I'm not destroyed. Terrified witless, shaking, retching with fear, yes. But no longer insecure. Because during my search for how you died, I somehow found myself to be a different person. ... Living my life. And it...
What he did was wrong. He doesn't deserve your love. But he does deserve your forgiveness, because otherwise he will grow like a weed in your heart until it's choked and overrun. The only person who suffers, when you squirrel away all that hate, is y...
According to Tobias, women hang around longer because they’re less capable of indignation and better at being humiliated, for what is old age but one long string of indignities? What person of integrity would put up with it?
Fate's got a fucking sick sense of humor. Fate is a shape-shifter. It's the kindest and most generous entity imaginable, laying out more goodness than a person deserves, and then it shrinks and curls and forms into something grotesque. You think its ...
Paradoxically, the more Michael kept me at a distance, the more I trusted him - perhaps because he was always willing to help me with tips and introductions even though he wanted absolutely nothing from me (and never reciprocated my nosiness with per...
Basic personality traits develop early in life and over time become inviolable, hardwired. Most people learn little from experience, rarely thinking of adjusting their behavior, see problems as emanating from those around them, and keep on doing what...
