- a few weeks after a short day, i started writing lots of letters. i don't know why, but it was one of the only things that made my boots lighter.
- there's something incredibly wonderful that i want to preserve.
- It was worst at night. I started inventing things, and then i couldn't stop, like beavers, which i know about. People think they cut down trees so they can build dams, but in reality it's because their teeth never stop growing, and if they didn't constantly file them down by cutting through all of those trees, their teeth would start to grow into their own faces, which would kill them. That's how my brain was.
- I thought about running away and never talking to anyone again. I thought about hiding under my bed. I thought about rushing downtown to see if i could somehow rescue him (dad) myself.
- I knew I could never let Mom hear the messages, because protecting her is one of my most important raison d'être
- We need much bigger pockets, I thought as I lay in bed, counting off the seven minutes that it takes a normal person to fall asleep. We need enormous pockets, pockets big enough for our families, and our friends, and even the people who aren't on our lists, people we've never met, but still want to protect. We need pockets for boroughs, and for cities, a pocket that could hold the universe.
- Sometimes, it comforts me to think that they do not mail the letters we write.
- I hope that one day you will have the experience of doing something you do not understand for someone you love.
- A Grandma writing a letter: I wish i could be a girl again, with the chance to live my life again. I have suffered so much more than I needed to. And the joys I have felt have not always been joyous. I could have lived differently.
- If I were to give a bracelet to you, now, I would measure your wrist twice.
- I got incredibly heavy boots about how relatively insignificant life is, and how, compared to the universe and compared to time, it didn't even matter if I existed at all.
- i was willing to be annoying if that's what was necessary
- Humans are the only animals that blushes, laughs, has religion, wages war, and kisses with lips. So in a way, the more you kiss with lips, the more human you are.
- We started marking off areas in the apartment as "Nothing Places," in which one could be assured of complete privacy, we agreed that we never would look at the marked-off zones, that they would be nonexistent territories in the apartment in which one could temporarily cease to exist
- There's nothing wrong with not understanding yourself
- I couldn't explain my need to myself, and that's why it was such a beautiful need, and there's nothing wrong with not understanding yourself.
- i hated myself for going, why couldn't i be the kind of person who stays?
- If he had taken one from the shelf he would have seen everything. But the books protected us.
- I'm sorry for my incapability of letting the unimportant things go, for my incapability of hold on to the important things.
- marriage of millimeters and rules
- i felt, that night, on that stage, under that skull, incredibly close to everything in the universe, but also extremely alone.
- thinking about her is the next best thing
- That's been my problem. I miss what i already have, and i surround myself with things that are missing.
- It's hard to say goodbye to the place you've lived
- There is nothing wrong with compromising. Even if you compromise almost everything
- I went to the guest room and pretended to write. I hit the space bar again and again and again. My life story was spaces.
- When i was a girl, my life was music that was always getting louder. Everything moved me. A dog following a stranger. That made me feel so much. A calendar that showed the wrong month. i could have cried over it. i did. Where the smoke from a chimney ended. How an overtuned bottle rested at the edge of a table. I spent my life learning to feel less. Everyday i felt less. Is that growing old? or is it something worse?
- You cannot protect yourself from sadness without protecting yourself from happiness.
- Touching him was always so important to me. It was something I lived for. I never could explain why. Little, nothing touches. My fingers against his shoulder. The outsides of our plain it, but i needed it. Sometimes i imagined stitching all of our little touches together.
- i regret that it takes a life to learn how to live, Oskar. Because if i were able to live my life again, I would do things differently.
- Years were passing through the spaces between moments
- Just because you haven't received any letters from me don't think I haven't written any.
- Keep thinking. As long as I am thinking, I am alive.
- Or maybe "suspension" is a better word. Because what was so inspiring about the leap was not how the jumper got from one borough to the other, but how he stayed between them for so long.
- it's getting almost impossible to hear you
- Not to my knowledge, but you continue to believe
- when i no longer had to be strong in from of you, I became very weak
- you were a wounded animal. The noise is still in my ears.
- I tried to invent optimistic inventions. But the pessimistic ones were extremely loud
- I wanted so much to have a life
- even just once, even for a second
- I'm terrible company
- what's the point of a lie that doesn't protect anything?
- why can't people say what they mean at the time?
- I was relieved, because I hadn't invented her
- Maybe it's true that you can use up all of your tears. Maybe Grandma's right about that. It was nice to think about, because what I wanted was to be empty.
- I've forgotten everything important in my life
- I told him, let me try to free you
- things were happening around us, but nothing was happening between us
- the spaces between our words grew
- Your mom and I met in a group for people that have lost family. That's where we became friends.
- just because you bury something, you don't really bury it
- i tried incredibly hard. I don't know how I could have tried harder.
- I don't believe in God, but I believe that things are extremely complicated, and her looking over me was as complicated as anything ever could be. But it was also incredibly simple. In my own life, she was my mom, and I was her son.
- We would have been safe
oct 31 2010 ∞
apr 22 2019 +
apr 22 2019 +