Quotes in category: “Authors”:

It's like dealing with a tornado. Once you are close enough to see it coming, there's nothing to do but weather the storm.

Which came first: the addict or the drug? You can't have an addiction unless there's something to crave; by the same token, a drug is nothing but a plant or a drink or a powder until someone wants it badly. The truth is, the addict and the drug came together. And therein lies the problem.

You don't need water to feel like you're drowning, do you?"

They were at different places in the same relationship, and like anything that's out of alignment, they were destined to crash sooner or later.

If you acted like you wanted something even when you didn't, you just might convince yourself along with everyone else. 

Maybe you had to leave in order to really miss a place; maybe you had to travel to figure out how beloved your starting point was.

But love wasn't about sacrifice, and it wasn't abut falling short of someone's expectations. By definition, love made you better than good enough; it redefined perfection to include your traits, instead of excluding them. 

People always say that, when you love someone, nothing in the world matters. But that's not true, is it? You know, and I know, that when you love someone, everything in the world matters a little bit more.

Do you know," Chris said softly, "what it's like to love someone so much, that you can't see yourself without picturing her? Or what it's like to touch someone, and feel like you've come home?" He made a fist, and rested it in the palm of his other hand. "What we had wasn't about sex, or about being with someone just to show off what you've got, the way it was for other kids our age. We were, well, meant to be together. Some people spend their whole lives looking for that one person," he said. "I was lucky enough to have her all along."

If you spent your life concentrating on what everyone else thought of you, would you forget who you really were? What if the face you showed the world turned out to be a mask... with nothing beneath it?

"She belonged to me," Chris said simply. "She was , you know, all the things I wasn't. And I was all the things she wasn't. She could paint circles around anyone; I can't even draw a straight line. She was never into sports; I've always been." Chris lifted his outstretched palm and curled his fingers. "Her hand," he said. "It fit mine."

"I think a person's life is supposed to be like a DVD.. You can see the version everyone else sees or you can choose the director's cut - the way he wanted you to see it, before everything else got in the way. There are menus, probably, so that you can start at the good spots and not have to relive the bad ones. You can measure your life by the number of scenes you've survived, or the minutes you've been stuck there. Probably though, life is more like one of those surveillance tapes. Grainy, no matter how hard you stare at it. And looped: the same thing, over and over. 

Nobody wants to admit this, but bad things will keep on happening. Maybe that's because it's all a chain, and a long time ago someone did the first bad thing, and that led someone else to do another bad thing, and so on. You know, like that game where you whisper a sentence into someones' ear, and that person whispers it to someone else, and it all comes out wrong in the end. But then again, maybe bad things happen because it's the only way we can keep remembering what good is supposed to look like 

So much of the language of love was like that: you devoured someone with your eyes, you drank in the sight of him, you swallowed him whole. Love was sustenance, broken down and beating through your bloodstream. 

In fairytales, when the mask came off, the handsome prince still loved the girl, no matter what --and that alone would turn her into a princess.

You could patch up whatever was broken, but if you were the one who had fixed it, you'd always know in your heart where the fault lines lay.

I close my eyes, sick of the riddles, and to my surprise all I could see were dandelions - as if they had been painted on the fields of my imagination, a hundred thousand suns. And I remembered something else that makes us human: faith, the only weapon in our arsenal to battle doubt.

College is a bubble. You Enter it for four years and forget there is a real world outside of your paper deadlines and midterm exams and beerpong championships. You don't read the newspaper - you read textbooks. You don't watch the news - you watch Letterment. But even so, bits and snatches of the universe manage to leak in.

There are also sorts of experiences that we can't really put a name to. The birth of a child, for one. Or the death of a parent. Falling in love. Words are like nets - we hope they'll cover what we mean, but we know they can't possibly hold that much joy, or grief, or wonder. Finding God is like that too. If it's happened to you, you know what it feels like. But try to describe it to someone else - and language only takes you so far. 

Life, it turns out, goes on. There is no cosmic rule that grants you immunity from the details just because you have come face-to-face with a catastrophe. 

The worst thing about endings is knowing that just ahead is the daunting task of starting over.

"You don’t love someone because their perfect," she says. "You love them in spite of the fact that they’re not."

Summertime, I think, is a collective unconscious. We all remember the notes that made up the song of the ice cream man; we all know what it feels like to brand our thighs on a playground slide that's heated up like a knife in a fire; we all have lain on our backs with our eyes closed and our hearts beating across the surface of our lids, hoping that this day will stretch just a little longer than the last one, when in fact it's all going in the other direction. 

You know how every now and then, you have a moment where your whole life stretches out ahead of you like a forked road, and even as you choose one gritty path, you've got your eye on the other the whole time, certain that you're making a mistake?

I wondered what happened when you offered yourself to someone, and they opened you, only to discover you were not the gift they expected and they had to smile and nod and say thank you all the same.