I shouldn’t have to be a liar to make someone love me. I shouldn’t be so afraid of losing someone that I’ll do anything to make them stay.

The most basic and somehow forgettable thing is this: Love is not pain. Love is goodness. And real love–it’s less shiny than solid and simple.

Flawed Human Parents + Shit Life Throws At You = Childhood That ‘Builds Character.

Maybe it was wrong, or maybe impossible, but I wanted the truth to be one thing. One solid thing.

In a world of insanity, nothing is sacred. It’s an insane world, nothing is sacred.

The hope was, people like me got to finally find our place in college or in the actual world. People who understood this told you that high school wasn’t the actual world, that it was...

If time heals all wounds, and a book can hold a person’s entire life, then you can speed up the process with a pulp time warp.

Knowledge is so comforting, but so is mystery.

You’ve got to say what you mean and mean what you say…Doubt in your voice is an open door people will shove right through.

It took me years to figure out that upset was upset, and tumultuousness was not the same thing as passion. Love isn’t drama.

And pity–people who inspire it in you are actually very powerful people. To get someone else to take care of you, to feel sorry for you–that takes a lot of strength, smarts, manipulation. Very powerful...

We look down our noses at people who’ve made mistakes in relationships. She’s so stupid! How could she do that! Our superiority makes us feel better. But I’d bet everything I have on the fact...

Truth was funny, because it was an insistent thing, maybe as powerful and insistent as some force of nature, the push of water or wind. You could keep it out only so long, but it...

If you look up “charming” in the dictionary, you’ll see that it not only has references to strong attraction, but to spells and magic. Then again, what are liars if not great magicians?

An untold story has a weight that can submerge you, sure as a sunken ship at the bottom of the ocean. I learned that. This kind of story, this kind of things kept secrets -they...

Usually, I set one foot in a library and I feel my own internal volume lower. A library is a physical equivalent of a sigh. It’s the silence, sure, but it’s also the certainty of...

If you don’t participate, you’re just taking up oxygen. (Bunny)Life is a banquet. Approach it with hunger. (Chuck)

This is what I know. Don’t settle for 40, 50, or even 80 percent. A relationship-it shouldn’t be too small or too tight or even a little scratchy. It shouldn’t take up space in your...

People are secretive when they have secrets.

Most of our parents wanted the best for us, I knew, but we also wanted the best for them.

I could forget that part, but it had to have been true.

It was one of those times you feel a sense of loss, even though you didn’t have something in the first place. I guess that’s what disappointment is- a sense of loss for something you...

Sometimes you’re sure dogs have some secret, superior intelligence, and other times you know they’re only their simple, goofy selves.

I love to see those paragliders weaving softly around Moon Point, their legs floating above you in the air. When they drift in for a landing, their feet touch the ground and they trot forward...

Maybe it was better to be who he thought I was than who I thought I was.

I had always had a little problem looking out for myself in love. I was afraid people would leave me. So I sort of clung and did everything possible to keep someone around. I didn’t...

Maybe a person’s world can grow bigger in all the right ways, not too wide that it becomes shallow, just large enough to preserve its depth.

It’s shocking the things we call love.

If happiness shouldn’t make you so miserable, misery shouldn’t make you so happy.

I don’t get why prom is like a mini-wedding these days…No one should spend that kind of money for a high school dance.

We should have the right to have someone leave when we want, to only allow those in who we want in. But the truth is, people can force their way into your life whenever they...

Marriage is like a well-built porch. If one of the two posts leans too much, the porch collapses. So each must be strong enough to stand on its own.

You have ordinary moments and ordinary moments and more ordinary moments, and then, suddenly, there is something monumental right there. You have the past and future colliding in the present, your own personal Big Bang,...

Those questions you have? Whether he’s the one, whether you feel about him the way you should, or whether the relationship is going okay? When you’re not sure whether you’re in love with someone or...

Family was even a bigger word than I imagined, wide and without limitations, if you allowed it, defying easy definition. You had family that was supposed to be family and wasn’t, family that wasn’t family...

True love, the good, beautiful, one-and-only kind, the kind between loving friends and family and partners who are mostly just trying hard to do their best, it manages to overlook some pieces of its story....

What is it about hairdressers? You tell them ‘not too short’ and some part of their hairdresser brain hears this as ‘whack the shit out of it.’ If you never say, ‘not too short,’ everything...

In the middle of the night I am awakened by a sound. I sit up abruptly in bed. I hear it again. It’s music. Wait, it sounds like the ice cream man, in our house....

The word just hangs, until Severin starts the blender and there’s only the sound of crunching and grinding vitamins, the silvery core of nourishment, containing every essential thing but the nourishment itself.” (pg. 82)

That’s what people do who love you. They put their arms around you and love you when you’re not so lovable.

It was more work than it seemed, looking through a telescope, as the Earth was continually moving and you had to move along with it. You don’t realize how fast this acutally happens, and it’s...

Our memories and events in our lives are untidy things. We wish that we can file them away and shut the door, or wish the opposite – that they would stay forever.

I’ve heard that people stand in bad situations because a relationship like that gets turned up by degrees. It is said that a frog will jump out of a pot of boiling water. Place him...

I didn’t know what I wanted to Be…A sense that I had permanently botched things already, embarked on the trip without the map. and it scared me too, that I might end up as a...

It was strange to have those papers signed. Like any big project or crisis that takes every waking and non-waking moment in your life, it was odd to have it concluded. A move, a college...

To be devasted, or to let the truth in, finally, finally, all the way, all the way, all the way, until it fills you with its own strength, with it’s own knowledge–that love is light...

A relationship could be a place to hide too.

If letting go, if letting people and things work themselves out in the way that they needed to without your help was the most important thing, then it was also the hardest.

It starts so young, and I’m angry about that. The garbage we’re taught. About love, about what’s “romantic.” Look at so many of the so-called romantic figures in books and movies. Do we ever stop...

But what I wanted back had never really been there. He was a temporary illusion, a mirage of water after walking in the desert. I had made him up. And he could have killed me....