commonplaces

I keep noticing so many people aren’t happy, and it’s been making me feel sick. I keep looking at everyone and thinking, Oh my God, I just want them to smile. I keep staring at people’s mouths. Do you know what I mean? I keep thinking, Oh my God, I just wish you were smiling—

“What do you want then?” The old answers came easily to mind. Money. Vengeance. Jordie's voice in my head silenced forever. But a different reply roared to life inside him, loud, insistent, and unwelcome. You, Inej. You.

We always receive more than we desire. We receive what we ask for, but sometimes in a different currency, a currency that turns out to be of greater worth.

So much held in a heart in a lifetime. So much held in a heart in a day, an hour, a moment. We're utterly open with no one in the end—not mother and father, not wife or husband, not lover, not child, not friend. We open windows to each but we live alone in the house of the heart.

I just … wanted to be in love. I wanted to love someone, and I wanted them to love me.

I’m just, you know. Here for however long you want to keep me.

When I first met her, I felt this weird shock, like recognition. Like I'd dreamed her face a hundred times before, but now was the first time I could see it clearly.

“Sometimes science isn’t enough. Sometimes you need the poets,” he says, and it’s in this moment, this exact moment, that I fall in love with him again.

I keep turning away from speaking of your letter. I feel—to speak of it would be to contain what it did to me, to make it small. I don’t want to do that.

he always gets what he wants, and then feels sorry for himself when what he wants doesn't make him happy.

People are messy, and love can be ugly. I’m inclined to always err on the side of compassion.

To paraphrase a prophet: Letters are structures, not events. Yours give me a place to live inside.

Emerged from the tentative ways, the obscurities and dazzle of youth, we look straight in front of us, ready for what may come. The door opens, the door keeps on opening. ,

Jacob thinks about what it means to desire. Does it require participation, or can it surface more covertly, realized but dormant, carefully concealed?

Do not fall in love with people like me. I will take you to museums, and parks, and monuments, and kiss you in every beautiful place, so that you can never go back to them without tasting me like blood in your mouth.

I felt connected to the smell of old books. The first time I smelled them, it was as if I’d encountered something I already knew.

There is no straight path in art or life. Sometimes there is no path at all and one must break down walls and machete their way through the woods to get where they need to go.