I wonder if this is how people always get close: They heal each other’s wounds; they repair the broken skin.
— Lauren Oliver (Pandemonium)
Because mermaids like to read too…?
It strikes me that this may be one of the differences between youth and age: when we are young, we invent different futures for ourselves; when we are old, we invent different pasts for others.
— Julian Barnes (The Sense of an Ending)
History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation.
— Julian Barnes (The Sense of an Ending)
What was the point of having a situation worthy of fiction if the protagonist didn’t behave as he would have done in a book?
— Julian Barnes (The Sense of an Ending)
the key to a happy family life was for there not to be a family – or at least, not one living together.
— Julian Barnes (The Sense of an Ending)
What you end up remembering isn’t always the same as what you have witnessed.
— Julian Barnes (The Sense of an Ending)
She was my sister; she loved me in spite of her menstrual cycle, and I was the only person besides Dad whom she couldn’t shut out entirely.
— Jay Clark (The Edumacation of Jay Baker)
Grief is like sinking, like being buried. I am in water the tawny color of kicked-up dirt. Every breath is full of choking. There is nothing to hold on to, no sides, no way to claw myself up. There is nothing to do but let go.
Let go. Feel the weight all around you, feel the squeezing of your lungs, the slow, low pressure. Let yourself go deeper. There is nothing but bottom. There is nothing but the taste of metal, and the echoes of old things, and days that look like darkness.
— Lauren Oliver (Pandemonium)
In that moment,
I realize
a circle of love
is ten times better
than a procession
of sorrys.
— Lisa Schroeder (I Heart You, You Haunt Me)
