Michelle > Books: male-perspective‎ (159)

"That's the thing about life and love—every time you take another look at them, there's something else that can be revised. For now, let me just say this: My name is Tiny Cooper, and it's time to raise the curtain on my bombastic, baffling, and hopefully stupendous story."

"Love is the most common miracle. Love is always a miracle, everywhere, every time. But for us, it's a little different. I don't want to say it's more miraculous—it is, though. Our miracle is different because some people say it's impossible. But let me tell you—it's possible. Very possible."

"Ralph wept for the end of innocence, the darkness of man's heart, and the fall through the air of the true, wise friend called Piggy."

"But without a reader, a story is only half complete. It's like blueprints that never get built; like a swimming pool without water. The foundation's there, but it's useless. Without a reader, the words just sit on the page, waiting to come alive in someone's imagination." (Hardcover, page 38)

"I'm scared, Oliver. I'm scared the sun is going to go down and you're going to realize you want to go home.' I frame her face in my hands, looking into her eyes. "I am home," I tell her." (Hardcover, page 55)

"We swayed back and forth. Dancing. In the dark and wet, the two of us together. It's my favorite memory of Ari out of a thousand memories. It's the one I keep on hand, the talisman. That was the girl I loved" (34).

"Who knows? Girls are insane, and dying girls are even more insane. Actually, that sounds fucked up. I take that back."

"To wake up and know this is who I am, this is what I do, this is where I belong. To have tasks and accomplish them. To have some goddamn pride. And she needed backup, I could tell, and I wanted to, I don't know, be her fuckin' knight in shining armor, I guess, but I couldn't get out of the truck fast enough."

"Soon, the party was a distant murmur, the music and laughter already memories. I walked more slowly, feeling close to my dad as I looked up at the familiar bend in the creek and the trees that leaned over it. His spot. I wished he were there right then, to tell me why boys were such jerks. I wanted to ask him if it would always be this hard."

"Here's a secret," I said. 'There's a difference between being dead and dying. We're all dying. Some of us die for ninety years, and some of us die for nineteen. But each morning everyone on this planet wakes up one day closer to their death. Everyone. So living and dying are actually different words for the same thing, if you think about it." (Hardcover, page 96)

"Except Latham was my normal now. And being healthy, being okay, wouldn't feel normal at all. It would feel incredible." (Page 61)

“The hardest thing about waiting to die is being torn between wanting more time and wishing they would just get it over with already. You can’t sleep, of course. you can’t focus on anything else. Your mind keeps tormenting you with questions and memories and what-ifs, until you wish they’d just do the favor and knock you senseless until it was time."

“If she kept kissing me like that, I imagined, maybe the other stuff wouldn't matter so much. But I felt guilty even thinking it.”

"There was no reason for the bottle to be there. Unless he'd been even more bent out of shape than I realized; he could easily have taken it out of his dad's liquor cabinet when he got home."

"Apparently it was only in the movies that you could just go in and figure out someone's password. Especially if you're a regular person like me and not some computer genius. I guessed Hayden would still be able to keep his secrets from me. Just like before."

"He has a new friend. The beautiful Player of the 233rd. A new friend. Maybe more."

"As she says that, a part of Sarah hopes it isn't true. She hopes this is just a wild teenage whim and that she's no actually falling for Jago. Falling in love with a rival would be about the worst thing that could happen. But then they kiss. And kiss. And kiss. And Sarah forgets."

"But why am I counting the days? The days don't matter. I'm in hell. A hell I've made myself, because I am evil. As evil as my mother. As evil as any Mask who spends a lifetime relishing the blood and tears of his victims."

"Tomorrow you must make a choice. Between deserting and doing your duty. Between running from your destiny and facing it. If you desert, the Augurs will not stop you. You will escape. You will leave the Empire. You will live. But you will find no solace in doing so. Your enemies will hurt you. Shadows will bloom in your heart, and you will become everything you hate—evil, merciless, cruel."

"Then she told me the worst part. Every night she went over there and he made another film of her. She was becoming his most popular subject, she said. His girl-next-door series. He said he wanted to have a thousand films of her. To film her entire life."

"And the films. I can barely describe them to you... It makes me want to... It makes you sick to think that this is the world we live in. That all this was going on in this beautiful treelined neighborhood among all these decent people."

"I remember it so clearly, the day that would change our lives forever: watching the moving van pull out of the driveway of the big old post-and-beam house across the driveway. It was the nicest house in the neighborhood."

"But that's where he was wrong. I didn't need distance. I just wanted to feel normal again. The way I had before Mom started rambling about monsters. Before we'd had to have her medicated and locked away, so she wouldn't hurt herself... or us."

“From the time I was four until I turned eight years old, I was terrified of dead ends. I’d somehow convinced myself that whenever you saw those signs they were warnings. Of the horrors that awaited you at the end of those roads, those streets. Of monsters. but there were no monsters here. Just me and Cara.”

"I watched water stream from the tips of Cara's hair and down her face. I was about to tell her she was beautiful, when she kissed me."

“I am tempted to inhale those sheets. If I do, maybe it will be enough to erase everything. But you can only hold your breath for so long. Eventually, I’ll have to exhale her, and then it’ll be like those mornings, when I wake up, forgetting before remembering.”

“I guess it was about loneliness. And it’s funny, because I don’t really think of myself as lonely. But there was something so familiar about the way Blue described the feeling. It was like he had pulled the ideas from my head.”

“If she thinks me drinking coffee is big news, it’s going to be quite a fucking morning.”

"Life and death aren't as different from each other as I thought they were. This isn't like walking into a new country. This is walking into a new room in the same house. This is sharing a hallway and the same row of framed family pictures, but there's a glass wall between. I'm right here. And not."

"I don't think of the sky as any kind of heaven item. I think of it as a bunch of gases and faraway echoes of things that used to be on fire."

“Don’t listen to it!” Tamara cried. “It’s a thing, not human—“Who would desire to be human? Human hearts break. Human bones shatter. Human skin can tear.”

"Buried under the earth where no one can find it," his father told him grimly. "There's no light down there. No windows. The place is a maze. You could get lost in the caverns and die and no one would ever know."

“Fire wants to burn.
Water wants to flow.
Air wants to rise.
Earth wants to bind.
Chaos want to devour.”