Ben, if you get pee in my brand-new car, I am going to cut your balls off.Still peeing, Ben looks over at me smirking. You´re gonna need a hell of a big knife, bro.
Look, let me just say it: He was hot. A nonhot boy stares at you relentlessly and it is, at best, awkward and, at worst, a form of assault. But a hot boy . . . well.
If you don’t live a life in service of a greater good, you’ve gotta at least die a death in service of a greater good, you know? And I fear that I won’t get either a life or a death that means anything.
Sometimes people don’t understand
the promises they’re making when they make them,” I said.
Isaac shot me a look. “Right, of course.
But you keep the promise anyway. That’s
what love is. Love is keeping the promise anyway. Don’t you believe in true love?
As he read, I fell in love the way you fall asleep: slowly, and then all at once.
Keeping the box closed just keeps you in the dark, not the universe… but failing to open the box doesn’t kill the cat.
I don’t know where people got the idea that characters in books are supposed to be likable. Books are not in the business of creating merely likeable characters with whom you can have some simple identification with. Books are in the business of creating great stories that make you’re brain go ahhbdgbdmerhbergurhbudgerbudbaaarr.
I figured something out, he said aloud. The future is unpredictable.Hassan said, Sometimes the kafir likes to say massively obvious things in a really profound voice.
Principled hate is a hell of a lot stronger than Boy, I wish you hadn’t mummified me and thrown me into the lake hate.
As far as I can tell, there are two basic (kissing) rules: 1. Don’t bite anything without permission. 2. The human tongue is like wasabi: it’s very powerful, and should be used sparingly.
Well, while you were in the bathroom, I sat down at this picnic table here in Bumblefug, Kentucky, and noticed that someone had carved that GOD HATES FAG, which, aside from being a grammatical nightmare, is absolutely ridiculous. So I’m changing it to ‘God Hates Baguettes.’ It’s tough to disagree with that. Everybody hates baguettes.
What the hell is that? I laughed.It’s my fox hat.Your fox hat?Yeah, Pudge. My fox hat.Why are you wearing your fox hat? I asked.Because no one can catch the motherfucking fox.
I spent the next three hours in classrooms, trying not to look at the clocks over various blackboards, and then looking at the clocks, and then being amazed that only a few minutes had passed since I last looked at the clocks, but their sluggishness never ceased to surprise. If I am ever told that I have one day to live, I will head straight for the hallowed halls of Winter Park High School, where a day has been known to last a thousand years.
The book was turned to the page with Anne Frank’s name, but what got me about it was the fact that right beneath her name there were four Aron Franks. FOUR. Four Aron Franks without museums, without historical markers, without anyone to mourn them. I silently resolved to remember and pray for the four Aron Franks as long as I was around.
It’s total bullshit,” he said. “The whole thing. Eighty percent survival rate and he’s in the twenty percent? Bullshit. He was such a bright kid. It’s bullshit. I hate it. But it was sure a privilege to love him, huh?
When things break, it’s not the actual breaking that prevents them from getting back together again. It’s because a little piece gets lost – the two remaining ends couldn’t fit together even if they wanted to. The whole shape has changed.
Life has become the future. Every moment of your life is lived for the future.
I don’t know how I look, but I know how I feel: Young. Goofy. Infinite.
I always had this idea that you should never give up a happy middle in the hopes of a happy ending, because there is no such thing as a happy ending. Do you know what I mean? There is so much to lose.
You’re both the fire and the water that extinguishes it. You’re the narrator, the protagonist, and the sidekick. You’re the storyteller and the story told. You are somebody’s something, but you are also your you.
You spend your whole life stuck in the labyrinth, thinking about how you’ll escape one day, and how awesome it will be, and imagining that future keeps you going, but you never do it. You just use the future to escape the present.
The feeling of loving her and being loved by her welled up in him, and he could taste the adrenaline in the back of his throat, and maybe it wasn’t over, and maybe he could feel her hand in his again and hear her loud, brash voice contort itself into a whisper to say I-love-you as if it were a secret, and an immense one.
You remember your first love because they show you, prove to you, that you can love and be loved, that nothing in this world is deserved except for love, that love is both how you become a person and why.
I’m in love with you, and I know that love is just a shout into the void, and that oblivion is inevitable, and that we’re all doomed and that there will come a day when all our labor has been returned to dust, and I know the sun will swallow the only earth we’ll ever have, and I am in love with you.
The thing about a spiral is, if you follow it inward, it never actually ends. It just keeps tightening, infinitely.
I’d had nearly four years of experience looking at these clocks, but their sluggishness never ceased to surprise. If I am ever told that I have one day to live, I will head straight to the hallowed halls of Winter Park High School, where a day has been known to last a thousand years.
I will not tell you our love story, because—like all real love stories—it will die with us, as it should.
Augustus,” I said. “Really. You don’t have to do this.”
“Sure I do,” he said. “I found my Wish.”
“God, you’re the best,” I told him.
“I bet you say that to all the boys who finance your international travel,” he answered.
Like many people, I feel like celebrating. Remember this feeling. It is human, and can help us understand when others express bloodlust.
The food was so good that with each passing course, our conversation devolved further into fragmented celebrations of its deliciousness:’I want this dragon carrot risotto to become a person so I can take it to Las Vegas and marry it.
Headline? he asked.’Swing Set Needs Home,’ I said.’Desperately Lonely Swing Set Needs Loving Home,’ he said.’Lonely, Vaguely Pedophilic Swing Set Seeks the Butts of Children,’ I said.
Everything that comes together falls apart. Everything. The chair I’m sitting on. It was built, and so it will fall apart. I’m gonna fall apart, probably before this chair. And you’re gonna fall apart. The cells and organs and systems that make you you—they came together, grew together, and so must fall apart. The Buddha knew one thing science didn’t prove for millennia after his death: Entropy increases. Things fall apart.
The oblivion fear is something else, fear that I won’t be able to give anything in exchange for my life. If you don’t live a life in service of a greater good, you’ve gotta at least die a death in service of a greater good, you know? And I fear that I won’t get either a life or a death that means anything.
There comes a time when we realize that our parents cannot save themselves or save us, that everyone who wades through time eventually gets dragged out to sea by the undertow- that, in short, we are all going.
I didn’t tell him that the diagnosis came three months after I got my first period. Like: Congratulations! You’re a woman. Now die.
You can’t just make yourself matter and then die, Alaska, because now I am irretrievably different, and I’m sorry I let you go, yes, but you made the choice. You left me Perhapsless, stuck in your goddamned labyrinth. And now I don’t even know if you chose the straight and fast way out, if you left me like this on purpose. And so I never knew you, did I? I can’t remember, because I never knew.
The thing about dead people… The thing is you sound like a bastard if you don’t romanticize them, but the truth is… complicated, I guess.
The times that were most fun seemed always to be followed by sadness now, because it was when life started to feel like it did when she was with us that we realized how utterly gone she was.
I felt the unfairness of it, the inarguable injustice of loving someone who might have loved you back but can’t due to deadness.
Oh God, Alaska, I love you. I love you, and the Colonel whispered, I’m so sorry, Pudge. I know you did, and I said, No. Not past tense. She wasn’t even a person anymore, just flesh rotting, but I loved her present tense.
I came here looking for a Great Perhaps, for real friends and a more-than-minor life..
When she fucked up all those years ago, just a little girl terrified into paralysis, she fell onto the enigma of herself.
We all know how loving ends. But I want to fall in love with the world anyway, to let it crack me open. I want to feel what there is to feel while I am here.
What I love about the sculpture is that it makes the bones that we are always walking and playing on manifest, like in a world that so often denies the reality of death and the reality that we are surrounded by and outnumbered by the dead. Here, is a very playful way of acknowledging that and acknowledging that and that always, whenever we play, whenever we live, we are living in both literal and metaphorical ways on the memory and bones of the dead.
I found myself thinking about President William McKinley, the third American president to be assassinated. He lived for several days after he was shot, and towards the end, his wife started crying and screaming, I want to go too! I want to go too! And with his last measure of strength, McKinley turned to her and spoke his last words: We are all going.
I don’t care if the New York Times writes an obituary for me. I just want you to write one. … You say you’re not special because the world doesn’t know about you, but that’s an insult to me. I know about you.
Just deleting vandalism on the Chuck Norris page, Radar said. For instance, while I do think that Chuck Norris specializes in the roundhouse kick, I don’t think it’s accurate to say, ‘Chuck Norris’s tears can cure cancer, but unfortunately he has never cried.
What about the rest of your life?”
She shrugged. “What about it?”
“Aren’t you worried about, like, forever?”
“Forever is composed of nows,” she says.
You do not immortalize the lost by writing about them. Language buries, but does not resurrect.
It’s a weird phrase in English, in love, like it’s a sea you drown in or a town you live in. You don’t get to be in anything else—in friendship or in anger or in hope. All you can be in is love.
Hazel has to realize that her mom was wrong when she said, “I won’t be a mother anymore.” The truth is, after Hazel dies (assuming she dies), her mom will still be her mom, just as my grandmother is still my grandmother even though she has died. As long as either person is still alive, that relationship survives. (It changes, but it survives.)
She noted, more than once, that the meteor shower was happening, beyond the overcast sky, even if we could not see it. Who cares if she can kiss? She can see through the clouds.
I’m in love with you, and I’m not in the business of denying myself the simple pleasure of saying true things.
It was an indulgence, learning last words. Other people had chocolate; I had dying declarations.
The real heroes anyway aren’t the people doing things; the real heroes are the people NOTICING things, paying attention. The guy who invented the smallpox vaccine didn’t actually invent anything. He just noticed that people with cowpox didn’t get smallpox.