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1 " ...healing isn’t just the part that looks like healing. You don’t just get fixed in a weekend. You have to keep making the choice to fix yourself. Every time you choose to be nice to yourself instead of being unkind. Every time you decide to experience life fully in all its shades of joy and sorrow. Every time you participate in the boring drudgery of self-care. The whole thing was the healing—everything that came before and everything that’s happened after. "
― , Broken People
2 " Maybe that’s how Eric felt about him, too, and this realization felt like the most vicious twist of the knife—that you had to see people as they truly were, not for who you wanted them to be. "
3 " And this is how life goes: there will be times where you feel like nothing more than a patchwork quilt of all the worst parts of yourself, and then there will be times when the call to be better is just so lovely and clear, like a bell ringing at a frequency all the voices that keep you up at night can’t hear. "
4 " What was that thing that his teacher had said? It’s not about what you remember. It’s about why you remember it that way. "
5 " Something bright flickered in him for a moment, not because he was happy, but because he was getting closer to the truth. “But it’s always that way with me. Too much and not enough. "
6 " he wished he had a partner still, someone to provide backup in the fight against quotidian challenges like a hummingbird invasion. "
7 " He always got snookered by charisma. It was his favorite drug. "
8 " He had known on some level, even if he couldn't articulate it clearly at the time, that the problem, the thing that kept him from being loved, was his tendency toward excess, the big hunger inside of him, the same force that had made him drink and drug that had mutated in sobriety to other things - mostly food and validation- and he stuffed the emptiness however he could. His need was bottomless. "
9 " Maybe some people are just born self-hating and self-destructive and we die that way. And so we go to therapy and twelve-step groups and we take antidepressants and anxiety meds and we journal and go to yoga and exercise and take baths and drink pressed juices and repeat affirmations to ourselves in the mirror and listen to Brené Brown podcasts. But we’re just swimming against the tide, because the darkness always comes back. All we ever do is learn to manage the symptoms. "
10 " He imagined Los Angeles burning to the ground, canyons and beaches ablaze, cinder and ash. Take me with you , he thought. Take me with you. "
11 " It was an amber-hued summer dream and even when the work was difficult, he loved the solitude, the quiet, the serenity. "
12 " You know what someone very wise once told me,” Buck said, and he leaned in toward Sam. “What?” “If dick fixed it,” Buck said with a grin, his voice going drag-queen liquid, “then dick would have fixed it by now. "
13 " He joked to Brett that he should start a fashion blog called Expensive Shit That Doesn’t Look That Dope On Me. "
14 " Maybe all gay men are made to feel, at some point, that they are wrong in the eyes of God, aberrations whose desires are dirty and shameful, and there is no more perfect reinforcement of this message than to fuck on crystal meth. It is both the escape from the feeling and the confirmation of it. "
15 " who wrote with a strange and dazzling lyricism that made the intellectual snob inside Sam, the version of him who cared about that sort of thing more than looks or personality or any other quality, weak-kneed. "
