We wanted the freedom to love. We wanted the freedom to choose. Now we have to fight for it.
I shiver, thinking how easy it is to be totally wrong about people-to see one tiny part of them and confuse it for the whole, to see the cause and think it’s the effect or vice versa
Popularity’s a weird thing. You can’t really define it, and it’s not cool to talk about, but you know it when you see it. Like a lazy eye, or porn.
Love: a single word, a wispy thing, a word no bigger or longer than an edge. That’s what it is: an edge; a razor. It draws up through the center of your life, cutting everything in two. Before and after. The rest of the world falls away on either side.
I’d rather die on my own terms than live on theirs. I’d rather die loving Alex than live without him.
I guess that’s just part of loving people: You have to give things up. Sometimes you even have to give them up.
In my dream I know I am falling. But there is no up or down, no walls or sides or ceilings, just the sensation of cold and darkness everywhere. I am so scared I could scream. But when I open my mouth, nothing happens. And I wonder if you fall forever and never touch down, is it really still falling? I think I will fall forever.
They say that just before you die your whole life flashes before your eyes, but that’s not how it happened for me.
I told you,” he whispers back. I can feel his breath just tickling the space behind my ear, making my hair prick up on my neck. “I like you.”
“You don’t know me,” I say quickly.
“I want to, though.
Most of the time – 99 percent of the time – you just don’t know how and why the threads are looped together, and that’s okay. Do a good thing and something bad happens. Do a bad thing and something good happens. Do nothing and everything explodes. And very, very rarely – by some miracle of chance and coincidence, butterflies beating their wings just so and all the threads hanging together for a minute – you get the chance to do the right thing.
Let me tell you something about dying: it’s not as bad as they says.it’s the coming-back-to-life part that hurts.
Two weeks until your cure she says finally. Sixteen days I say, but in my head I’m counting: Seven days. Seven days until I’m free and away from all these people and their sliding superficial lives brushing past one another gliding, gliding, gliding from life to death. For them there’s hardly a change between the two.
The secret is,” I say, whispering right into his ear, “that yours was the best kiss I’ve ever had in my life.”“But I’ve never kissed you,” he whispers back. Around us the rain sounds like falling glass. “Not since third grade, anyway.” I smile, but I’m not sure if he can see it.“Better get started, then,” I say, “because I don’t have much time.
Things change after you die, though, I guess because dying is the loneliest thing you can do.
My point is: maybe you can afford to wait. Maybe for you there’s a tomorrow. Maybe for you there’s one thousand tomorrows, or three thousand, or ten, so much time you can bathe in it, roll around it, let it slide like coins through your fingers. So much time you can waste it.But for some of us there’s only today. And the truth is, you never really know.
Sometimes I feel like if you just watch things, just sit still and let the world exist in front of you – sometimes I swear that just for a second time freezes and the world pauses in its tilt. Just for a second. And if you somehow found a way to live in that second, then you would live forever.
What glitters may not be gold; and even wolves may smile; and fools will be led by promises to their deaths.
Find the things that matter, and hold on to them, and fight for them, and refuse to let them go.
Of all the miracles Po had seen in the time and space of its death, Po thought this–the absorption of another, the carrying of it–was the most bewildering and remarkable of all. Whenever Bundle separated again, Po was left with an ache of sadness that reminded the ghost of the body it had left behind.
Who knows? Maybe they’re right. Maybe we are driven crazy by our feelings. Maybe love is a disease, and we would be better off without it.
But we have chosen a different road. And in the end that is the point of escaping the cure: We are free to choose.
We are even free to choose the wrong thing.
Everyone just wasting time because they have so much of it to waste, minutes slipping by on who’s with who and did you hear.
It was all very strange, Mr. Gray thought, as he wiped the coffee canister clean with a sponge. Very, very mysterious. You were born; you lived a whole life; and at the end, you wound up in a coffee canister.Ah, well, he said out loud quietly. That’s just the way things are. Life’s a funny business. Death, he supposed, was the punch line.
The hours here are flat and round, disks of gray layered one on top of the other…they move slowly, at a grind, until it seems as though they are not moving at all. They are just pressing down…
But before you start pointing fingers, let me ask you: is what I did really so bad? So bad I deserved to die? So bad I deserved to die like that?Is what I did really so much worse than what anybody else does? Is it really so much worse than what you do?Think about it.
I know that the whole point—the only point—is to
find the things that matter, and hold on to them, and fight for them, and refuse to
let them go.