…”better to have loved and lost” bullshit. Don’t show me paradise and then burn it down.
Getting into a fight with a popular senior. Pissing off a school teacher and the local chief of police. Hanging with two major-league losers.” She slapped my back. “Welcome to high school.
Mrs. Friedman lived in a happy snow globe of AP History.
There are few times that I feel more at peace, more in tune, more Zen, if you will, than when I force myself to unplug.
Dreams never die. Sometimes you think they are dead, but they are just hibernating lie some old bear. And, if the dream has been hibernating for a long time, that bear is going to wake up grumpy and hungry
Muse usually gestured like an amphetamine-fueled Sicilian who’s nearly gotten clipped by a speeding car.
You live among this ridiculous wealth and you get lost. You worry about nonsense like spirituality and inner health and satisfaction and relationships.You have no idea what it is like to starve, to watch yourself turn to bones.
A trial is two narratives competing for your attention.
A friend once told Megan that we are always seventeen years old, waiting for our lives to begin. More than ever, clutching to this man, Megan understood that.
Violence doesn’t solve anything. Win would make a face when I said that, but the truth was, whenever I resorted to violence, it never just ended there. Violence ripples and reverberates. It echoes and really never seems to go silent.
The gray has no chance against that smile. It vanishes in a wonderful haze of bright color.
Secrets…were cancers. Secrets festered. Secrets ate away at your innards, leaving behind nothing but a flimsy husk.
Some people, no matter how easy the path they are given on the walk of life, will find a way to mess it all up. Ray Levine was one of those people.
An hour before his world exploded like a ripe tomato under a stiletto heel, Myron bit into a fresh pastry that tasted suspiciously like urinal cake.
He tried to read, but the words swam in front of his eyes in meaningless waves. He put on the television. Nick at Nite, the cultural equivalent of aerosol cheese.
You want to put people in neat categories, make them monsters or angels, but it almost never works that way. You work in the gray and frankly that kinda sucks. The extremes are so much easier.
This is the price you pay for having a great father. You get the wonder, the joy, the tender moments – and you get the tears at the end, too.
Make no mistake, adolescence is a war. No one gets out unscathed.
I don’t necessarily love the sports per se, I love the stories behind them. Also in a kind of perverse way I like to study what it does to us, why we care so much. It’s caring about something that’s utterly meaningless.
In the end, we know what makes us happy. We also know what makes us unhappy. That’s the irony. We know and yet we still mess it up. That’s part of the human condition, no, and why we need to work on it.
Tragedy is a hell of a teacher. It’s much too strict, but it’s a hell of a teacher.
‘Caught’ is a novel of forgiveness, and the past and the present – who should be and who shouldn’t be forgiven. None of my books are ever just about thrills, or it won’t work.
You can’t have an up without a down, a right without a left, a back without a front – or a happy without a sad.