Sometimes I can hear my bones straining under the weight of all the lives I’m not living.
I am not sad, he would repeat to himself over and over, I am not sad. As if he might one day convince himself. Or fool himself. Or convince others — The only thing worse than being sad is for others to know that you are sad.
I love you also means I love you more than anyone loves you, or has loved you, or will love you, and also, I love you in a way that no one loves you, or has loved you, or will love you, and also, I love you in a way that I love no one else, and never have loved anyone else, and never will love anyone else.
She had fallen in love so many times that she began to suspect she was not falling in love at all, but doing something much more ordinary.
It’s not that I want people to think I am smart, or even that I am a good writer. I write because I want to end my loneliness.
We need much bigger pockets; I thought as I lay in bed, counting off the seven minutes that it takes for a normal person to fall asleep. We need enormous pockets, pockets big enough for our families and our friends and even people who aren’t on your lists, people we’ve never met, but still want to protect. We need pockets for boroughs and for cities, pockets that could hold the universe.
I don’t know, but it’s so painful to think, and tell me, what did thinking ever do for me, to what great place did thinking ever bring me? I think and think and think, I’ve thought myself out of happiness one million times, but never once into it.
Time was passing like a hand waving from a train I wanted to be on. I hope you never have to think about anything as much as I think about you.
I like to see people reunited, I like to see people run to each other, I like the kissing and the crying, I like the impatience, the stories that the mouth can’t tell fast enough, the ears that aren’t big enough, the eyes that can’t take in all of the change, I like the hugging, the bringing together, the end of missing someone.
The distance that wedged itself between me and my happiness wasn’t the world, it wasn’t the bombs and burning buildings, it was me, my thinking, the cancer of never letting go.
