There are two kinds of people, he thought: the people you don’t want to touch because you’re afraid you’re going to break them, and the people you don’t want to touch because you’re afraid they’ll break you.
. . .
A statue isn’t built from the ground up—it’s chiseled out of a block of marble—and I often wonder if we aren’t likewise shaped by the qualities we lack, outlined by the empty space where the marble used to be. I’ll be sitting on a train. I’ll be lying awake in bed. I’ll be watching a movie; I’ll be laughing. And then, all of a sudden, I’ll be struck by the paralyzing truth: It’s not what we do that makes us who we are. It’s what we don’t do that defines us.
. . .
And I imagined that if I were in some other, better universe, there’d be someone who could tell me, It’s okay, or You’ll get ’em next time, tiger. Someone would tell me that all the stupid things I’d done, all my mistakes, they didn’t matter. This someone would say that, no matter what, she was proud of me, that I filled her heart with warmth, and that that’s really the most you could hope for in life—to just for an instant make somebody else just a little bit happier. She would tell me that—guess what!—everything was going to be all right.
. . .
It was a conversation piece really; good-looking American chicas could come up to him and say, “Hey, what happened to your foot?” And he could respond, “Better question: What happened to our society to make it so we view damaged things as somehow incomplete? On the contrary, I, for one, believe it is our damage that makes us whole.” And then he could have sex with them.
. . .
“Everyone who ever loves me one day outgrows me.”
. . .
“Oh, shit. Is this because I said you were smart last night, and now you have to like be the smart one all the time? You know, that’s the problem with teenagers—you decide what you are, and then like you can’t be anything else.”
. . .
Is better to be truthful? Or is better to keep up appearance, so that others have good thoughts of you, know they can depend.
. . .
“I do think I’m overthinking things,” I said. “I think that all the time. But then I think, What if I’m not overthinking things? What if I’m just regular-thinking things but then I think I’m overthinking things because I subconsciously want to let myself off the hook?”
. . .
You have super-strength and photon blasts. I mean, don’t get me wrong, it’s awesome that you did that, but when’s the last time you did something that actually scared you?
. . .
For some reason I had this idea that I was really special and that I was put here to do something really great and important, but the longer I kept living the more it just seemed like nope, I’m just kind of a normal person just like everybody else.
. . .
I’d like to see you around a girl you actually liked. I bet you’d be the biggest fucking moron in the world.
. . .
And I loved Mutt, in that way that you love something when you’re at a place in your life when you’re ready to love something and there’s a thing there that you can love.
. . .
And I thought about how, actually, if you wanted to, you could say the same thing about life. That life is terrifying and overwhelming and it can happen at any moment. And when you’re confronted with life you can either be cowardly or you can be brave, but either way you’re going to live. So you might as well be brave.
. . .
Because of course your natural response to affection is criticism. Of course it is. Isn’t that so like your character, after all?
. . .
I think you and I share the same disillusionment, sprouted from long-buried hope.
. . .
“You turn me to mush” was perhaps a bit much—yes, in hindsight his error was here; The poem’s detachment undone in an instant by something so baldly sincere.
. . .
The poem was clever, but cloyingly so, overflowing with whimsy and vim. So, was it for her, as the verses asserted, or was it, in fact, more for him?
. . .
She briefly wondered if hundreds of years after she was gone and forgotten, her last remaining legacy would be a never-checked email account that still received dozens of messages a day from automatic email bots who had no idea she was long dead and therefore not interested in an exciting buy-one-get-one-twenty-percent-off offer from Sephora.
. . .
But now, Lucinda was getting very good at not thinking about any of that. In fact, that night, she had trouble sleeping, because she was so consumed by not thinking.
. . .
I feel like loyalty has to be good for something in this cutthroat world, because otherwise what are we even doing?
