I am not good at noticing when I’m happy, except in retrospect.
What I am telling you, before you begin my story, is this — two things: I crave truth. And I lie.
My father told me once that the most important thing every man should know is what he would die for.
We think of mortality so little these days…I thought of the stern Victorian determination to keep death in mind, the uncompromising tombstones.Remember, pilgrim, as you pass by,As you are now so once was I:As I am so will you be…
I don’t do that kind of negativity. If you put your energy into thinking about how much the fall would hurt, you’re already halfway down.
I had learned early to assume something dark and lethal hidden at the heart of anything I loved. When I couldn’t find it, I responded, bewildered and wary, in the only way I knew how: by planting it there myself.
We were still at the age when girls are years older than guy, and the guys grow up by doing their best when the girls need them to.
Human beings, as I know better than most, can get used to anything. Over time, even the unthinkable gradually wears a little niche for itself in your mind and becomes just something that happened.
A bore or an uggo might manage not to get up anyone’s nose, but if a girl’s got brains and looks and personality, she’s going to piss someone off, somewhere along the way.
Throughout history–even a hundred years ago, even fifty–it was discontent that was considered the threat to society, the defiance of natural law, the danger that had to be exterminated at all costs. Now it’s contentment,
I loved him, you know,’ she said. ‘I would have loved him as hard as he’d let me, for the rest of my life.
We’ve become a nation of defaulters: we buy on credit, and when the bill comes in, we’re so deeply outraged that we refuse even to look at it.
Interesting fact from the front lines: raw grief smells like ripped leaves and splintered branches, a jagged green shriek.
Who who whose smell in the air of her room, whose fingerprints all over her friends’ secret places.
For as long as I could remember, a part of me had been waiting for the day it would happen; with the cunning that comes to people whose minds have been stripped to one desire, she picked the only day we weren’t waiting for.
That long sigh again, above us. This time I saw it, moving through the branches. Like the trees were listening; like they would’ve been sad about us, sad for us, only they’d heard it all so many thousand times before.
The lines of her face, turned up to the sky, would have broken your heart.
It meant nothing. Some people are like that: everything comes out like a lie. Not that they’re brilliant liars, just that they’re useless at telling the truth. You get left with no way to tell what’s the real fake and what’s the fake one.
Her forehead was a maze of anxious little grooves, from a lifetime of wondering about whether everyone within range was OK.
You can’t take credit for what you do when your back is against the wall.
Everyone else we knew growing up is the same: image of their parents, no matter how loud they told themselves they’d be different
Girlfriends aren’t allowed to care if you have Stilton socks. Friends are.” All the same, she gave her hands a quick, professional shake and took hold of my foot. “Plus, you might be less of a pain in the arse if you got more action.
Breslin gives me his wise-teacher smile, which is kind and crinkly and would make me feel warm all over if I was dumber than a bag of hair.
How’s Alison getting on?’Conway snorted. ‘Tucked up in the sick room like she’s dying in some season finale. Little fadey voice on her and all. She’s having a great old time.
He told me and Rafe to stay put in case you came home, burn the note and get hot water and disinfectant and bandages rea
If she had hurt me, I could have forgiven her without even having to think about it; but I couldn’t forgive her for being hurt.
and I wanted this girl who was like no girl I had ever known, wanted her not in spite of her moods and her secret bruises and her sad attempts at artifice but because of them, because of them all.
I should’ve known the eyes. Wide, bright blue, and something about the delicate arc of the lids: a cat’s slant, a pale jeweled girl in an old painting, a secret.
Always fuck with people’s expectations, sunshine. It’s good for their circulation.
The sudden, painful flare of envy caught me by surprise. I was a loner, my last few years in school. I could have done with a friend like that.
In my book, the media are a necessary evil: they live off the animal inside us, they bait the front pages with second-hand blood for the hyenas to snuffle up, but they come in useful enough that you want to stay on their good side.
Sacrifice is not an option, or an anachronism; it´s a fact of life. We all cut off our own limbs to burn on some altar. The crucial thing is to choose an altar that is worth it and a limb you can accept losing.
Don’t fool yourself: we all have a cruel streak. We keep it under lock and key either because we’re afraid of getting punished or because we believe this will somehow make a difference, make the world a better place.