| main | ongoing | archive | private |
- “Being with him made my brain quiet. I didn’t have to invent a thing.” [12]
- “Well, what I don’t get is why do we exist? I don’t mean how, but why.” I watched the fireflies of his thoughts orbit his head. He said, “We exist because we exist.” “What the?” “We could imagine all sorts of universes unlike this one, but this is the one that happened.” [13]
- “Just because you’re an atheist, that doesn’t mean you wouldn’t love for things to have reasons for why they are.” [13]
- “The meaning of my thoughts started to float away from me, like leaves that fall from a tree into a river, I was the tree, the world was the river.” [16]
- “We laughed and laughed, together and separately, out loud and silently, we were determined to ignore whatever needed to be ignored, to build a new world from nothing if nothing in our world could be salvaged, it was one of the best days of my life, a day during which I lived my life and didn’t think about my life at all.” [28]
- “If I’d been somone else in a different world I’d've done something different, but I was myself and the world was the world, so I was silent.” [30]
- “The end of suffering does not justify the suffering, and so there is no end to suffering, what a mess I am, I thought, what a fool, how foolish and narrow, how worthless, how pinched and pathetic, how helpless.” [33]
- “Feathers filled the small room. Our laughter kept the feathers in the air. I thought about birds. Could they fly if there wasn’t someone, somewhere, laughing?” [78]
- “I have no need for the past, I thought, like a child. I did not consider that the past might have a need for me.” [78]
- “I did not need to know if he could love me. I needed to know if he could need me.” [84]
- “When Dad was tucking me in that night and we were talking about the book, I asked if he could think of a solution to that problem. “Which problem?” “The problem of how relatively insignificant we are.” He said, “Well, what would happen if a plane dropped you in the middle of the Sahara Desert and you picked up a single grain of sand with tweezers and moved it one millimeter?” I said, “I’d probable die of dehydration.” He said, “I just mean right then, when you moved that single grain of sand. What would that mean?” I said, “I dunno, what?” He said, “think about it.” I thought about it. “I guess I would have moved a grain of sand.” “Which would mean?” “Which would mean I moved a grain of sand?” “Which would mean you changed the Sahara.” “So?” “So? So the Sahara is a vast desert. And it has existed for million of years. And you changed it!” “That’s true!” I said, sitting up. “I changed the Sahara!” “Which means?” he said. “What? Tell me.” “Well, I’m not talking about moving that one grain of sand one millimeter.” “Yeah?” “If you hadn’t done it, human history would have been one way…” “Uh-huh?” “but you did do it, so…?” I stood on the bed, pointed my fingers at the fake stars, and screamed: “I changed the course of human history!” “That’s right.” “I changed the universe!” “You did.” “I’m God!’ “You’re an atheist.” “I don’t exist!” I fell back onto the bed, into his arms, and we cracked up together. [86]
- “Humans are the only animal 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.” [99]
- "Songs are as sad as the listener.” [108]
- “I like to see people reunited, maybe that’s a silly thing, but what can I say, I like to see people run into each other, I like the kissing and the crying, I like the impatience, the stories that the mouth can’t tell fast enough, the ears that aren’t big enough, the eyes that can’t take in all of the change, I like the hugging, the bringing together, the end of missing someone…” [109]
- “..Literature was the only religion her father practiced, when a book fell on the floor he kissed it, when he was done with a book he tried to give it away to someone who would love it..” [114]
- “I thought that maybe if she could express herself rather than suffer herself, if she had a way to relieve the burden, she lived for nothing more than living, with nothing to get inspired by, to care for, to call her own…” [119]
- “I should have drowned us there in the room, ended our suffering, they would have found us floating face-down in two thousand white pages, or buried under the salt of my evaporated tears…” [124]
- “I’m trying,” Mr. Goldberg said to me, as if only the two of us existed. “Trying what?” I asked, in a voice more concerned than I’d wanted, he took off his glasses again, “Trying to be.” [126]
- “We go on killing each other to no purpose! It is war waged by humanity against humanity, and it will only end when there’s no one left to fight.” [128]
- “Just two days ago she said that her life story was happening faster than her life.” [130]
- “I thought, it’s a shame that we have to live, but it’s a tragedy that we get to live only one life, because if I’d had two lives, I would have spent one of them with her.” [133]
- “I can’t live, I’ve tried and I can’t. If that sounds simple, it’s simple like a mountain is simple.” [135]
- “I felt, that night, on that stage, under that skull, incredibly close to everything in the universe, but also extremely alone. I wondered, for the first time, if life was worth all the work it took to live. What exactly made it worth it? What’s so horrible about being dead forever, and not feeling anything, and not even dreaming? What’s so great about feeling and dreaming?” [145]
- “So many people enter and leave your life! Hundreds of thousands of people! You have to keep the door open so they can come in! But it also means you have to let them go!” [153]
- “Life. It was the ultimate secret.” [177]
- “When I was a girl, my life was music that was always getting louder. Everything moved me. A dog followed a stranger. That made me feel so much. A calendar that showed the wrong month. I cried over it… I spent my life learning to feel less.” [180]
- “You cannot protect yourself from sadness without protecting yourself from happiness.” [180]
- “He pointed at, Sometimes one simply wants to disappear. I pointed at, There’s nothing wrong with not understanding yourself. He pointed at, How sad. I pointed at, And I wouldn’t say no to something sweet.He pointed at, Cried and cried and cried. I pointed at, Don’t cry. He pointed at, Broken and confused. I pointed at, Something. He pointed at, Nothing. I pointed at, Something. Nobody pointed at, I love you.”
- “That is what death is like. It doesn’t matter what uniforms the soldiers are wearing. It doesn’t matter how good the weapons are. I thought if everyone could see what I saw, we would never have war anymore.” [189]
- “No matter how much I feel, I’m not going to let it out. If I have to cry, I’m gonna cry on the inside. If I have to bleed, I’ll bruise. If my heart starts going crazy, I’m not gonna tell everyone in the world about it. It doesn’t help anything. It just makes everyone’s life worse….” “But if you’re burying your feelings deep inside you, you won’t really be you, will you?” [201]
- “It’s the tragedy of loving, you can’t love anything more than something you miss.” [208]
- “Every moment before this one depends on this one.” [232]
- ”Feeling pain is still better than not feeling, isn’t it?” [245]
- ““I thought about all of the things that everyone ever says to each other, and how everyone is going to die, whether it's in a millisecond, or days, or months, or 76.5 years, if you were just born. Everything that's born has to die, which means our lives are like skyscrapers. The smoke rises at different speeds, but they're all on fire, and we're all trapped.” ” [245]
- “She let out a laugh, and then she put her hand over her mouth, like she was angry at herself for forgetting her sadness.” [255]
- “And then a thought came into my brain that wasn’t like the other thoughts. It was closer to me, and louder. I didn’t know where it came from, or what it meant, or if I loved it or hated it. It opened up like a fist, or a flower.” [259]
- “I’m sure I don’t have to tell you that the vast majority of the universe is composed of dark matter. The fragile balance depends on things we’ll never be able to see, hear, smell, taste, or touch. Life itself depends on them. What’s real? What isn’t real? Maybe those aren’t the right questions to be asking. What does life depend on? I wish I had made things for life to depend on. What if you never stop inventing? Maybe you’re not inventing at all.” [305]
- “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 only life, she was my mom, and I was her son.” [324]
jan 31 2009 ∞
aug 6 2010 +
aug 6 2010 +