Books > People

Your mind will believe comforting lies while also knowing the painful truths that make those lies necessary. And your mind will punish you for believing both.

Are you some sort of saint or something?“ Inside, I laugh. Me? A saint? I list what I am. Taxi driver. Local deadbeat. Cornerstone of mediocrity. Sexual midget. Pathetic cardplayer. I say my final words to her. "No, I’m not a saint, Sophie. I’m just another stupid human.

What’s the point in being alive if you don’t at least try to do something remarkable? How very odd, to believe God gave you life, and yet not think that life asks more of you than watching TV.

it isn’t what we left behind that breaks me it’s what we could’ve built had we stayed

Do you ever wonder whether people would like you more or less if they could see inside you? I mean, I’ve always felt like the Katherines dump me right when they start to see what I look like from the inside. But I always wonder about that. If people could see me the way I see myself—if they could live in my memories—would anyone, anyone, love me?

It’s impeccable how brutal the truth can be at times. You can only admire it. Usually, we walk around constantly believing ourselves. “I’m okay,” we say. “I’m all right.” But sometimes the truth arrives on you, and you can’t get it off. That’s when you realize that sometimes it isn’t even an answer— it’s a question. Even now, I wonder how much of my life is convinced.

That’s always seemed so ridiculous to me, that people want to be around someone because they’re pretty. It’s like picking your breakfast cereals based on color instead of taste.

People really are like houses with vast rooms and tiny windows. And maybe it’s a good thing, that way we never stop surprising each other.

Someday no one will remember that she ever existed’, I wrote in my notebook, and then, ‘or that I did’. Because memories fall apart, too. And then you’re left with nothing, left not even with a ghost but it’s shadow. In the beginning, she had haunted me, haunted my dreams, but even now, just weeks later, she was slipping away, falling apart in my memory and everyone else’s, dying again.

It amazes me what humans can do, even when streams are flowing down their faces and they stagger on, coughing and searching, and finding.

I don’t belong with you anymore.” “Wrong. The Crucible drew us together.” “The Crucible?” “I was eleven years old, and I’d lost my mother, and my soul, and the Crucible gave me you.” “It made us roommates.” “We were always more.” “We were enemies.” “You were the center of my universe. Everything else spun around you.

But I’m tired of coming out. All I ever do is come out. I try not to change, but I keep changing, in all these tiny ways. I get a girlfriend. I have a beer. And every freaking time, I have to reintroduce myself to the universe all over again.

The way you were before… Simon Snow, there wasn’t a day when I believed we’d both live through it.“ “Though what?” “Life. You were the sun, and I was crashing into you. I’d wake up every morning and think, ‘This will end in flames.‘

The thing I realize is that it’s not what you take. It’s what you leave.

Love doesn’t kill friendship. It definitely doesn’t kill family. Except it sorta does, doesn’t it?

Sharing a room with the person you want most is like sharing a room with an open fire. He’s constantly drawing you in. And you’re constantly stepping too close. And you know it’s not good–that there is no good–that there’s absolutely nothing that can ever come of it. But you do it anyway. And then… Well. Then you burn.

once lived a girl in a bubble who i suspected was nothing but trouble still i gave her my heart but she blew it apart and left me with nothing but rubble