please don't make me a joke..

John Green - Looking for Alaska

We are all of us in this room still waiting to be transformed. This is why we search for love. We search for it all our lives, even after we find it.

I had two desires: desire to be safe and desire to feel.

It does me no good; violence has changed me. / My body has grown cold like the stripped fields; / now there is only my mind, cautious and wary, / with the sense it is being tested.

suppose the body did this to us, made us afraid of love—

We look at the world once, in childhood. The rest is memory.

—the gift of expression that has so often failed me. Failed me, tormented me, virtually all my life.

But in you I felt something beyond the archetype— a true expansiveness, a buoyance and love of the earth utterly alien to my nature.

How heavy my mind is, filled with the past. Is there enough room for the world to penetrate? It must go somewhere, it cannot simply sit on the surface—