Bokelskere.no

The seas are full of forgotten monsters, yes, but they're full of forgotten glories too. And the people who stay home and sit out the war never get to see them. That's what I think, anyway.

Like old wood, we splintered apart at the slightest touch, until we were nothing but slivers stuck in each other's fingertips.

Illness cared nothing about money or fairness or the things you planned to do later.

We hated them; we wanted them to love us. We wanted to be them; we wanted to never, ever become them.

Suicide is akin to jumping from the top roof of a burning skyscraper - it's not that you are unafraid of jumping, but the fall is the lesser of two terrors.

"Do you always handle pain like this?" she says. "By trying to make others uncomfortable?"

I would have pitied any adult who told me that things would change. For you, I would have thought, but not for us.

When you were an adult, all the promises of your life was foreclosed upon, every day just a series of compromises mitigated by little pleasures that distracted you from your former wildness, from your truth. Sylvia Plath, Marilyn Monroe, Edie Sedwick, Janis Joplin. They got to be beautiful forever.

When you grow up, who you were as a teenager either takes on a mythical importance or it's completely laughable.

At fifteen, the world ended over and over and over again. To be so young is a kind of self-violence. No foresight, an inflated sense of wisdom, and yet you're still responsible for your mistakes.

To the moment before I tasted alcohol, to virginity and not really knowing that things die, back to believing that something great is up ahead, back to before I made the choices that would hem me in to the life I live now.

I want to go home, but what I mean, what I'm grasping for, is not a place, it's a feeling. I want to go back. But back where?

Privilege is something to be aware of, to fight to see beyond, but ultimateley to be grateful for. It's like a bulletproof vest; it makes you harder to kill.

At fifteen, I believed that I would grow up to be the exception to every rule.

Tell me what you can't forget, and I'll tell you who you are.

My sister will die over and over again for the rest of my life. Grief is forever. It doesn't go away; it becomes part of you, step for step, breath for breath. I will never stop grieving Bailey because I will never stop loving her. That's just how it is. Grief and love is cojoined, you don't get one without the other.

There's not one truth ever, just a whole bunch of stories, all going at once, in our heads, in our hearts, all getting in the way of each other. It's all a beautiful calamitous mess.

All her knowledge is gone now. Everything she ever learned, or heard, or saw [...] I heard this expression once: Each time someone dies, a library burns.

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.

Our hearts were broken in the same places. That's something like love, but maybe not the quite the thing itself.