- But mothers lie. It's in the job description.
- Crying adds something: crying is you, plus tears. But the feeling Colin had was some horrible opposite of crying. It was you, minus something. He kept thinking about one word― forever ―and felt the burning ache just beneath his rib cage.
- He liked all books, because he liked the mere act of reading, the magic of turning scratches on a page into words inside his head.
- He was nearsighted. The future lay before him, inevitable but invisible.
- The theorem rests upon the validity of my long standing argument that the world contains precisely two kinds of people: Dumpers and Dumpees. Everyone is predisposed to being either one or the other, but of course not all people are COMPLETE Dumpers or Dumpees.
- They like their coffee like they like their ex-boyfriends: bitter.
- He wanted to draw out the moment before the moment―because as good as kissing feels, nothing feels as good as the anticipation of it.
- She was nothing but good and I was nothing but bad, but then she died, and I didn't.
- He loved the scratching of pencil against paper when he was this focused: it meant something was happening.
- "I think we're opposites, you and me," she said finally. "Because personally I think mattering is a piss-poor idea. I just want to fly under the radar, because when you start to make yourself into a big deal, that's when you get shot down. The bigger a deal you are, the worse your life is. Look at, like, the miserable lives of famous people."
- You can love someone so much, he thought. But you can never love people as much as you can miss them.
- But he always had books. Books are the ultimate Dumpees: put them down and they'll wait for you forever; pay attention to them and they always love you back.
- And that's why he liked her, and loved her. She spoke to him in a language that, no matter how hard you studied it, could not be completely understood.
- "It's just that I learned a while ago that the best way to get people to like you is not to like them too much."
- If people could see me the way I see myself―if they could live in my memories―would anyone, anyone, love me?
- I'm nothing. The thing about chameleoning your way through life is that it gets to where nothing is real.
- I'm a total non-doer. I'm just sucking food and water and money out of the world, and all I'm giving back is, 'Hey, I'm really good at not-doing. Look at all the bad things I'm not doing! Now I'm going to tell you some jokes!'
- People are supposed to care. It's good that people mean something to you, that you miss people when they're gone.
- "That's what I was thinking before you came. I was thinking about your mattering business. I feel like, like, how you matter is defined by the things that matter to you. You matter as much as the things that matter to you do. And I got so backwards, trying to make myself matter to him. All this time, there were real things to care about: real, good people who care about me, and this place. It's so easy to get stuck. You just get caught in being something, being special or cool or whatever, to the point where you don't even know why you need it; you just think you do."
- I don't think you can ever fill the empty space with the thing you lost.
- I don't think your missing pieces ever fit inside you again once they go missing.
- That's what I've been thinking, that maybe life is not about accomplishing some bullshit markers.
- "It's funny, what people will do to be remembered."
- I like knowing one story and having everyone else know another. That's why those tapes we made are going to be so great one day, because they'll tell stories that time has swallowed up or distorted or whatever.
- I remember stories. I connect the dots and then out of that comes a story. And the dots that don't fit into the story just slide away, maybe. Like when you spot a constellation. You look up and you don't see all the stars. All the stars just look like the big fugging random mess that they are. But you want to see shapes; you want to see stories, so you pick them out of the sky.
- And the moral of the story is that you don't remember what happened. What you remember becomes what happened. And the second moral of the story, if a story can have multiple morals, is that Dumpers are not inherently worse than Dumpees―breaking up isn't something that gets done to you; it's something that happens with you.
- In that moment, the future―uncontainable by any Theorem mathematical or otherwise―stretched out before Colin: infinite and unknowable and beautiful.
- The future will erase everything―there's no level of fame or genius that allows you to transcend oblivion. The infinite future makes that kind of mattering impossible.
- And he found himself thinking that maybe stories don't just make us matter to each other―maybe they're also the only way to the infinite mattering he'd been after for so long.
- And Colin thought: Because like say I tell someone about my feral hog hunt. Even if it's a dumb story, telling it changes other people just the slightest little bit, just as living the story changes me. An infinitesimal change. And that infinitesimal change ripples outward―ever smaller but everlasting. I will get forgotten, but the stories will last. And so we all matter―maybe less that a lot, but always more than none.
- So Colin drove past the Hardee's and out onto the interstate headed north. As the staggered lines rushed past him, he thought about the space between what we remember and what happened, the space between what we predict and what will happen. And in that space, Colin thought, there was room enough to reinvent himself―room enough to make himself into something other than a prodigy, to remake his story better and different―room enough to be reborn again and again. A snake killer, an Archduke, a slayer of TOCs―a genius, even. There was room enough to be anyone―anyone except whom he'd already been, for if Colin had learned one thing from Gutshot, it's that you can't stop the future from coming. And for the first time in his life, he smiled thinking about the always-coming infinite future stretching out before him.
- Colin's skin was alive with the feeling of connection to everyone in that car and everyone not in it. And he was feeling not-unique in the very best possible way.
sep 1 2013 ∞
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