“Oscar Wilde once said that to live is the rarest thing in the world, because most people just exist, and that’s all. I don’t know if he’s right, but I do know that I spend a long time existing, and now, I intend to live.”
“Life is the tragedy,' she said bitterly. 'You know how they categorize Shakespeare's plays, right? If it ends with a wedding, it's a comedy. And if it ends with a funeral, it's a tragedy. So we're all living tragedies, because we all end the same way, and it isn't with a goddamn wedding.” “There's a word for it," she told me, "in French, for when you have a lingering impression of something having passed by. Sillage. I always think of it when a firework explodes and lights up the smoke from the ones before it."
"That's a terrible word," I teased. "It's like an excuse for holding onto the past."
"Well, I think it's beautiful. A word for remembering small moments destined to be lost.”
“Words could betray you if you chose the wrong ones, or mean less if you used too many. Jokes could be grandly miscalculated, or stories deemed boring, and I'd learned early on that my sense of humor and ideas about what sorts of things were fascinating didn't exactly overlap with my friends'.”
“If everything really does get better, the way everyone claims, then happiness should be graphable. But that's crap, because better isn't quantifiable.”
“You have this maddening little smile sometimes, like you've just thought of something incredibly witty but are afraid to say it in case no one gets the joke.”
“And I realized that there's a big difference between deciding to leave and knowing where to go.”
“She tasted like buried treasure and swing sets and coffee. She tasted the way fireworks felt, like something you could get close to but never really have just for yourself.”
“I wondered what things what things became when you no longer needed them, and I wondered what the future would hold once we'd gotten past our personal tragedies and proven them ultimately survivable.”
“You see? You're just figuring it out now, but I discovered a long time ago that the smarter you are, the more tempting it is to just let people imagine you. We move through each other's lives like ghosts, leaving behind haunting memories of people who never existed.”
“We have all been fooled into believing in people who are entirely
"I think I'll stick with reality," I said, handing Cassidy back her phone.
She stared at it, and then me, disappointed. "I'd think you of all people would want to escape."
"Imaginary prisoners are still prisoners.”
“To Cassidy, the panopticon wasn't a metaphor. It was the greatest failing on everything she was, a prison she had built for herself out of an inability to appear anything less than perfect. And so she ghosted on, in relentless pursuit of escape, not from society, but from herself. She would always be confined by what everyone expected of her because she was too afraid and too unwilling to correct our imperfect imaginings.”
“History is filled with fictional people.”
“I pictured her tragically; it never once ocurred to me to picture her as the tragedy.”
“You see? You're just figuring it out now, but I discovered a long time ago that the smarter you are, the more tempting it is to just let people imagine you. We move through each other's lives like ghosts, leaving behind haunting memories of people who never existed. The popular jock. The mysterious new girl. But we're the ones who choose, in the end, how people see us. And I'd rather be misremembered. Please, Ezra, misremember me.”
“The funny thing about gold is how quickly it can tarnish.”
“It was about being able to dance like Cassidy did, as though no one was watching, as though the moment was infinite enough without needing to document its existence.”
“Still here, Faulkner?" Luke sneered.
"Still doing that terrible impression of Draco Malfoy?" I asked.”
“I'm not permitted to explain the rules of the game. Nor to acknowledge whether or not we're playing one.”
“Sometimes I think that everyone has a tragedy waiting for them, that the people buying milk in their pajamas or picking their noses at stoplights could be only moments away from disaster. That everyone's life, no matter how unremarkable, has a moment when it will become extraordinary - a single encounter after which everything that really matters will happen.”
“It’s like . . . I’m paranoid about people borrowing my laptop because I’m convinced they’ll find some secret document on there that would make the whole world think I’m a terrible person—something I don’t even remember writing. And it doesn’t matter that there’s no document like that. I’m still terrified, you know?”
“The world tends toward chaos, you know," Cassidy said. You could too. Just write down a made up name, or even a fictional character. And the next person who finds this geocache, it's as though thing
“It was like the part of me that had enjoyed those friends had evaporated, leaving behind a huge, echoing emptiness, and I was scrabbling on the edge of it, trying not to fall into the hole within myself because I was terrified to find out how far down it went.”
“And that was when I saw what Cassidy had done to herself: the gold and red ribbing on her sweater-vest, the matching stripes on her tie, the gray uniform skirt, and the navy blazer draped over her arm...
"Is that a Gryffindor tie?" I asked.
"And an official Harry Potter Merchandise sweater-vest," she
confirmed smugly.”
“The way I figured it, keeping quiet was safe. Words could betray you if you choose the wrong ones, or mean less if you used too many.”
“Why do they even call it that, "saving yourself"? Like we need to be rescued from sex? It's not like virgins spend their whole lives engaged in the sacred ceremony of "being saved" from intercourse.”
“Ezra, the girl you're chasing after doesn't exist. I'm not some bohemian adventurer who takes you on treasure hunts and sends you secret messages. I'm this sad, lonely mess who studies too much and pushes people away and hides in her haunted house.”
“Outwardly mocking, but never quite to the point if not wanting to participate.”
“Not at all, I just don't understand how the Arch Alchemist became mortal all of a sudden."
"Because he split his soul into seven pieces and hid them all over Justice City," Toby retorted.
"You turned our comic book into a Harry Potter rip-off?" I spluttered.”
“Sorry,' I apologized, realizing she was the sort of girl who got upset when someone used an unfamiliar word, rather than learning what it meant.
“You can always tell when it's Friday. There's an excitement specific to Fridays, coupled with relief that another week has passed”
“Austin believes that winning or losing in binary is meaningless when there's a high score to beat.”
“I fell in love with her courage, her sincerity and her flaming self respect and it’s these things I’d believe in even if the whole world indulged in wild suspicions that she wasn’t all that she should be. . . . I love her and that’s the beginning and end of everything. —F. SCOTT FITZGERALD”
“I reached for the switch on my desk lamp and flashed HELLO.
The lights switched off in Cassidy's bedroom, and her flashlight flicked on.
SORRY.
"She's sorry," I told Cooper, because he didn't understand Morse code.
He lifted his head as if to say But you already knew that, old sport.
Her flashlight flickered again.
FORGIVE ME.
This time, I didn't hesitate.
ALWAYS, I replied.”
“So," I said as Cassidy and I headed toward Mr. Moreno's room, "I didn't see any secret messages last night."
"I didn't want to be predictable," Cassidy retorted. "But at least now I know you're paying attention.”
“Oh come on,'Pheobe continued. 'You're asking for it. Pale skin, black clothes, no lunch and that whole brooding thing? It's hilarious. You should get body glitter and go after an unsuspecting freshman.'
'You should!' Cassidy agreed. 'Tell her you're a dangerous monster. And mention how good her blood smells.'
'Wrong time of the month on that one, and I'm getting slapped,' I muttered, and everyone laughed.”
“You're funny.' Phoebe passed me the last chocolate cupcake. 'And I always thought your friends were laughing over their own farts.'
'Ninety percent of Eastwood's male population laughs over their own farts. Present company excluded, naturally.”
“How many beers do y'all think it takes before one internationally scientist turns to another and says, 'Dude, bet you twenty bucks I can levitate a frog with a magnet?' ' Sam drawled.”
“But we had plenty of time for youthful indecision, both apart and together, for limping into the future past the unforgettable ash heaps of our histories.”
“She didn't add the elements that allowed me to proceed down a different path. She lent a spark, perhaps, or tendered the flame, but the arson was mine.”
“No one went looking for adventure; they chased it away.”
“Eastwood was distorted for me, a picturesque place meant to lull its residents into believing that behind our gates and beyond our curfew, nothing bad could ever happen with any sort of permanence. It was a place so fatally flawed that it refused to acknowledge that any such imperfection was possible.”
“I made a decision that year, to start mattering in a way that had nothing to do with sports teams or plastic crowns, and the reality is, I might have made that decision without her, or if I'd never fallen in love with a girl who considered love to be the biggest disaster of all.” “I do know that I spent a long time existing, and now, I intend to live.”
“...history is filled with fictional people. We have all been fooled into believing in people who are entirely imaginary - made-up prisoners in a hypothetical panopticon. But the point isn't whether or not you believe in imaginary people; it's whether or not you want to.”
“It was the answer to the wrong mystery--the mystery I didn't ever want to solve. And so we sat there in the sickening sillage of the truth, neither of us angry, or upset, just muddling through this shared sorrow, this collective pity. And as much as I wanted to sound my tragic wail over the rooftops, and let go of the day, and crawl back toward that safe harbor and give in to the dying of the light, and to do all of those unheroically injured things that people never write poems about, I didn't.”
No comments:
Post a Comment