“If I was a spider princess, she said I would spin webs the color of sky and catch drops of sunlight to give to children who watch too much TV and then everyone would remember to come outside to play. If I was a spider princess, she said, things would be different.”
“There are days I drop words of comfort on myself like falling leaves and remember that it is enough to be taken care of by my self.”
“He has a hole where his heart used to be because it fell out when he was running from scary things one night in a dream and it hurts all the time now and he doesn’t know how to fix it and sometimes I think he doesn’t even remember that it’s gone.”
“When she played her music even the night demons stopped their work and it took them some time to remember what it was they were doing and the best of them had no stomach for it for a long time after that.”
“inner beauty: has a really beautiful soul but hasn’t found a way to express it yet.”
“The clock is a conspiracy and a crime against humanity and I would not own one except I miss appointments without it.”
“Is willing to accept that she creates her own reality except for some of the parts where she can’t help but wonder what the hell she was thinking.”
“When people asked how old she was, she would say 1009365 more or less because she was so glad to be alive that she counted every day a birthday. She had some disagreement from her knees about the actual figures though…”
“I have too much to lose, she said, if I cross that line. Like what? I said. She could not think of anything that day so she said she’d get back to me. Since then I’ve been thinking what I would lose if I crossed my line and I haven’t come up with anything either. There’s always another line somewhere.”
“I think my life would be easier, he said, if I could just get my selves to agree on something.”
“The secret is not in your hand or your eye or your voice, my aunt once told me. The secret is in your heart. Of course, she said, knowing that doesn’t make it any easier.”
“She saw herself reflected in the store window and then the sun changed and she disappeared and all she could see was her eyes and she remembered thinking, I make a very nice floor lamp and that was the day she decided to quit her job.”
“Most people don’t know there are angels whose only job is to make sure you don’t get too comfortable and fall asleep and miss your life.”
“He wore a pot on his head in all kinds of weather. I never learned to cook and I got it after my mother died, he said. I just know it would make her happy that I’m using it.”
“He is self-conscious because everyone knows he has wings but they’ve never seen him fly. Now and then there will be a feather in odd places or maybe a footprint to show he was there. All in all, he thinks it’s nobody else’s business what he does with his free time.”
“Off on another adventure of a lifetime and hoping he won’t forget halfway through this time.”
“She asked me when the season of joy was supposed to end and I said I didn’t really think there was an exact date, so we left the tree up till June that year.”
“In my dream, the angel shrugged and said, if we fail this time, it will be a failure of imagination and then she placed the world gently in the palm of my hand.”
“She said she usually cried at least once each day not because she was sad, but because the world was so beautiful and life was so short.”
“In those days, we finally chose to walk like giants and hold the world in arms grown strong with love and there may be many things we forget in the days to come, but this will not be one of them.”
“I have a friend who reads people’s auras. H sees all sorts of colors like green and red and purple. He says anyone can do it. All it takes is forgetting everything you think you know and just looking. I’ve tried it and even though I haven’t seen any colors yet, everyone I meet looks so beautiful when I stop knowing everything, that it’s pretty hard to go back to the old way.”
“I’ve always liked the time before dawn because there’s no one around to remind me who I’m supposed to be, so it’s easier to remember who I am.”
“I used to believe my father about everything but then I had children myself and now I see how much stuff you make up just to keep yourself from going crazy.”
“We lay there and looked up at the night sky and she told me about stars called blue squares and red swirls and I told her I’d never heard of them. Of course not, she said, the really important stuff they never tell you. You have to imagine it on your own.”
“This is a dress-up box for the future and it’s filled with stuff like courage and love and play because they’re the only things that are any use at all when you get right down to it.”
“This is a machine that’s supposed to make people good and true and kind and the funny thing is that it works best when it’s completely broken down so everyone has to stop what they’re doing and get together and figure out how to fix it.”
“I spent a long time trying to find my center until I looked closely one night and found it had wheels and moved easily in the slightest breeze, so now I spend less time sitting and more time sailing.”
“Make sure you got clean underwear, she always said, in case you get in an accident and I always figured that’d be the least of my worries, but now I’m older and I see there’s a lot you can’t control and some you can control and clean underwear is one of those you can. For the most part.”
“I don’t know how long I can do this, he said. I think the universe has different plans for me and we sat there in silence and I thought to myself that this is the thing we all come to and this is the thing we all fight and if we are lucky enough to lose, our lives become beautiful with mystery again and I sat there silent because that is not something that can be said.”
“Not exactly schizophrenic in the classical sense, but close enough that people give him all the room he needs on the sidewalk.”
“This is a creature on fire with love, but it’s still scary since most people think love only looks like one thing, instead of the whole world.”
“Filled to the brim with dangerous thoughts and no where to put them since she lives in a small town and everybody’s always watching.”
“I once had a garden filled with flowers that grew only on dark thoughts but they need constant attention and one day I decided I had better things to do.”
“I try and get a lot of living in early in the morning before everyone else gets up, because after that, it doesn’t seem so much like living as it does putting up with stuff.”
“I try not to cry about everything I’ve done wrong she said, because I don’t get enough fluids as it is already.”
“Everything changed the day she figured out there was exactly enough time for the important things in her life.”
“There are things I refuse to show you, my mirror told me. You’ve got enough to worry about already.”
“Deciding everything is falling into place perfectly as long as you don’t get too picky about what you mean by place. Or perfectly.”
“For a long time, she flew only when she thought no one else was watching.”
“I don’t really have any secrets, she told me once. I just forget a lot of stuff.”
“I knew a man in college who grew up in the inner city of Chicago and what he was doing in Iowa I never did figure out. But whenever he would see a jet trailing across the sky, he would stop everything he was doing and he would watch. Once, after a jet was gone and there was nothing left but the white line disappearing like a scar into the blue, he turned to me and said, An airplane is a miracle and I did’ give it much thought, but now and then, when I am ready to give up hope for human beings in general, and for one or two of them who are bugging me specifically, I will look to the sky and there will be one of those miracles and I will remember it’s all about concentrating on the right thing.”
“Hard to impress because she’s already seen the sun rise today and it doesn’t get much better than that.”
“Things to know about the future #1: It doesn’t have to look any particular way, but around here, if it doesn’t, a lot of people will never speak to you again.”
“We grow a lot faster than trees, he said, so we miss a lot of stuff.”
“What are you good at? I said and she said, mainly life. I work best with stuff that has a high tolerance for mistakes.”
“I used to be pretty clear on what was real and what I made up, but with everything going on in the world, none of that seems to matter, so I just decided to talk less and smile to myself more so as not to add to the general confusion.”
“I’m a good jumper, he said, but I’m not so good at landing. Maybe you should stay closer to the ground then, I said and he shook his head and said the ground was the whole problem in the first place.”
“The first time her laughter unfurled its wings in the wind, we knew that the world would never be the same.”
“I was never good at hide and seek because I’d always make enough noise so my friends would be sure to find me. I don’t have anyone to play those games with anymore, but now and then I make enough noise just in case someone is still looking and hasn’t found me yet.”
“Torn between wanting to stay and wanting to go and worried it will be the wrong decision either way.”
“Leaning out as far as she can, hoping she’ll fall soon, so she can stop worrying about whether it will happen or not.”
“I always wanted to invent something that would move around and make funny noises and would change the world as we know it and I forgot all about that until we had kids and now I see I came pretty close.”
“When I first met him, I knew in a moment I would have to spend the next few days re-arranging my mind so there’d be room for him to stay.”
“We’re here to end it, I said and she said, No, we’re here to begin it and then she turned and opened her arms and everywhere I could see, there were people, like bright birds, calling with a thousand voices and suddenly I understood. Here is where it beings. With all of us, together giving our daughters a world worth loving for a lifetime to come.”
“They left me with your shadow, saying things like life is not fair and I believed them for a long time. But today, I remembered the way you laughed and the heat of your hand in mine and I knew that life is more fair than we can ever imagine if we are there to live it.”
“Life was much easier when all I had to do was make sure I got my homework done, he said.”
“He just sat in the church looking up at nothing in particular and I whispered what are you doing? and he said if Jesus had been a chicken would we have Weber grills all over the place instead of crosses? and I had a hard time concentrating after that, too.”
“Not sure when you stop thinking dandelions are beautiful, but figures it’s somewhere around the time you get a job and can afford lawn chemicals.”
“They don’t have very long memories, so every morning seems like a miracle.”
“These are little packets of light and you need to plant them early in the year and remember to mark where they were because lots of times they look like weeds in the beginning and it’s not until later that you see how beautiful they really are.”
“She kept asking if the stories were true. I kept asking her if it mattered. We finally gave up. She was looking for a place to stand and I wanted a place to fly.”
“I only do this until I get dizzy and then I lay down on my back and watch the clouds, she said. It sounds simple but you won’t believe how many people forget the second part.”
“How many people can you love before it’s too much? she said and I said I didn’t think there was any real limit as long as you didn’t care if they loved you back.”
“There has never been a day when I have not been proud of you, I said to my daughter, though some days I’m louder about other stuff so it’s easy to miss that.”
“I wish you could have been there for the sun and the rain and the long, hard hills. For the sound of a thousand conversations scattered along the road. For the people laughing and crying and remembering at the end. But mostly, I wish you could have been there.”
“Getting ready to jump as high as she can just because there’s only so long you can sit politely and listen while people talk about any old stuff that comes into their heads.”
“Anyone can slay a dragon, he told me, but try waking up every morning and loving the world all over again. That’s what takes a real hero.”
“Traveling as fast in one direction as she can go before she has second thoughts and goes back to doing the same old stuff.”
“How can you be sure it has a soul? she said. You can’t, I said, unless you’ve got one yourself.”
“She asked me if I had kids and when I said I did she said make sure you teach them what’s right. And I said how will I know? And she nodded and said, good point, just don’t teach them any obvious wrong then.”
“I asked her why she never told us about the Ten Commandments and she said she wasn’t ever that good with numbers so she loved everything as best she could and I remember thinking who needs all those rules anyway with a mother like her around.”
“This is a giant block of whatever is most difficult for you to carry and trust me on this, you’ll carry it more times than you can count until you decide that’s exactly what you want to do most and then it won’t weigh a thing anymore.”
“Trying to remember when it stopped being theory and turned into real life, because theory was a whole lot easier.”
“Sticking his neck out because he’s tired of just sitting there hoping people will notice him for his calm energy.”
“Tired of knowing everything without ever being sure.”
“I used to wait for a sign, she said, before I did anything. Then one night I had a dream and an angel in black tights came to me and said, you can start any time now, and then I asked is this a sign? and the angel started laughing and I woke up. Now I think the whole world is filled with signs, but if there’s no laughter, I know they’re not for me.”
“This is a wheelbarrow I filled with all my dreams and my favorite clothes and now all I need is someone to help me push it.”
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