You matter as much as the things that matter to you. And I got so backwards trying to matter to him. All this time, there were real things to care about: real, good people who care about me, and this...
We need never be hopeless, because we can never be irreparably broken. We think that we are invincible because we are.
We need never be hopeless because we can never be irreperably broken.
Then Augustus Waters reached into a pocket and pulled out, of all things, a pack of cigarettes. He flipped it open and put a pack between his lips. Are you serious? I asked. You think that’s cool? Oh,...
The whole thing was the precise opposite of what I figured it would be: slow and patient and quiet and neither particularly painful nor particularly ecstatic
The sky is like a monochromatic contemporay painting, drawing me in its illusion of depth, pulling me up.
The only way out of the labyrinth of suffering is to forgive
The Colonel explained to me that 1. this was Alaska's room, and that 2. she had a single room because the girl who was supposed to be her roommate got kicked out at the end of last year, and that 3. A...
That's who you really like. The people you can think out loud in front of.
She's cute, I thought, but you don't need to like a girl who treats you like you're ten: You've already got a mom.
She was nothing but good and I was nothing but bad, but then she died, and I didn't.
She raised one leg and gave me all her weight as I dipped her. She either trusted me or wanted to fall.
People always talk like there's a bright line between imagination and memory, but there isn't, at least not for me. I remember what I've imagined and imagine what I remember.
One swing set, well worn but structurally sound, seeks new home. Make memories with your kid or kids so that someday he or she or they will look into the backyard and feel the ache of sentimentality a...
Oh God, Alaska, I love you. I love you, and the Colonel whispered, I'm so sorry, Pudge. I know you did, and I said, No. Not past tense. She wasn't even a person anymore, just flesh rotting, but I love...
Nineteenth-century preacher Henry Ward Beecher's last words were Now comes the mystery. The poet Dylan Thomas, who liked a good drink at least as much as Alaska, said, I've had eighteen straight whisk...
Mom sobbed something into Dad's chest that I wish I hadn't heard, and that I hope she never finds out that I did hear. She said, I won't be a mom anymore. It gutted me pretty badly.
Just like that. From a hundred miles an hour to asleep in a nanosecond. I wanted so badly to lie down next to her on the couch, to wrap my arms around her and sleep. Not f*ck, like in those movies. No...
It's gas! It's gonna blow! Ben shouts. He throws open the passenger door and takes off, running in a panic. He hurdles a split-rail fence and tears across a hay field. I get out as well, but not in qu...
It took me a sleeve of Girl Scout Thin Mints and forty minutes to get over that boy.