Mark walks out of the store and into the mall with a kind of confidence that Donghyuck can tell is built on either toxic masculinity or legitimate happiness. Happiness is foreign, though, and the small smile on Mark's face always aches with emptiness, so it's certainly the former. Donghyuck groans and jumps to sit on the counter.

_

"Do you even play games, Hyuckie?" Chenle asks.

"Life is a game," Donghyuck says with a smile.

"Don't-" comes Taeyong's weak protest.

"And I'm losing," Donghyuck finishes.

"You're so angsty," Chenle says with a giggle. "Lighten up, yeah?"

_

he loved the pain even if he was loath to admit it

Lies I've told my 3 year old recently

Trees talk to each other at night.

All fish are named either Lorna or Jack.

Before your eyeballs fall out from watching too much TV, they get very loose.

Tiny bears live in drain pipes.

If you are very very quiet you can hear the clouds rub against the sky.

The moon and the sun had a fight a long time ago.

Everyone knows at least one secret language.

When nobody is looking, I can fly.

We are all held together by invisible threads.

Books get lonely too.

Sadness can be eaten.

I will always be there.

-----

Lies I've told my 4 year old recently

The mole men live in the subways.

The bird men live in the skies.

real adventure is defined best as a journey

from which you may not come back alive,

and certainly not as the same person.

Yvon Chouinard

-----

you take delight not in a city's

seven or seventy wonders,

but in the answer it gives

to a question of yours.

Italo Calvino

-----

before it's too late,

without thinking too much about it first,

pack a pillow and a blanket

and see as much of the world as you can.

you will not regret it.

Jhumpa Lahiri

The hour from night to day.

The hour from side to side.

The hour for those past thirty.

-

The hour swept clean to the crowing of cocks.

The hour when earth betrays us.

The hour when wind blows from extinguished stars.

The hour of and-what-if-nothing-remains-after-us.

-

The hollow hour.

Blank, empty.

The very pit of all other hours.

-

No one feels good at four in the morning.

If ants feel good at four in the morning

--three cheers for the ants. And let five o'clock come

if we're to go on living.

there are many romantic reasons

to watch the sunrise.

once it started,

it was hard to leave.

i wanted to own it.

i wanted it to be

a confirmation

that I was alive.

(most of the time, however, it felt condemning)

Stephanie Danler

-----

if you are interested in something,

no matter what it is,

go at it at full speed ahead...

lukewarm is no good.

hot is no good either.

white hot and passionate is the only thing to be.

Roald Dahl

-----

sometimes i can feel

he's a grey area in a world that doesn't like grey areas

but the grey areas are where you find the complexity

it's where you find the humanity

and it's where you find the truth

Jon Ronson: Strange answers to the psychopath test

opinionated but i'm always spitting straight facts

-----

hecky heck, I want death

-----

every day means a new twenty four hours. it means that everything’s possible again. you live in the moment, you die in the moment, you take it all one day at a time.

Marie Lu

my thoughts are stars i cannot fathom into constellations

John Green

-----

i'm restless

things are calling me away.

my hair is being pulled by the stars again.

Anais Nin

-----

(a good swimming pool could do that -)

make the rest of the world seem impossibly insignificant,

as far away as the surface of the moon

Emma Straub

the best moments in reading

are when you come across something...

which you had thought

special and particular to you.

now here it is,

set down by someone else,

a person you have never met,

someone even who is long dead.

and it is as if a hand

has come out

and taken yours.

Alan Bennett

-----

a story can always break into pieces

while it sits inside a book on a shelf;

and, decades after we have

read it even twenty times;

it can open us up, by cut or caress;

to a new truth

Andre Dubus

-----

clouds are poems,

The price of trust is always betrayal

I’m not even surprised anymore

I’m the fool for being deceived

Love, people, they’re all the same

In the end, there’s one conclusion, I am alone

From the beginning to the end

beast, YeY