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1 " Running is like music. It requires rhythm and focus. It requires dedication. It requires a dogged ability to shut out everything else. The herd is strung out below me, keeping time with the thump and slap of their cross-trainers. I hold the sound in my head and subtract cars, trucks, motorcycles, voices until it’s nothing but a song. "
― Brenna Yovanoff , Places No One Knows
2 " Your gods don't know you exist.And that's okay. "
3 " I assumed it was a matter of time. One day I’d meet someone who counteracted my chemical structure. We would compete for supremacy, collide until one of us was forced to yield, or else go forth together, suspended in eternal stalemate. But my model is inaccurate. The poets are wrong. The opposite of ice isn’t fire. It’s water. "
4 " I want to be William Shakespeare and Galileo and Robert Frost. I want to be Sappho. I want to be Jane Austen. I want to be Holden Caulfield and Marilyn Monroe and Joan of Arc. I’m sad to think they came before me in history, they made their mark without me. But they were there. They happened. "
5 " Sometimes you do things that feel bad later just so you don't feel worse right now. "
6 " The world is under no obligation to be sane or orderly. "
7 " If we were having this conversation, that meant something was either wrong with me, or it was wrong with everybody else, and I had a basic enough understanding of probability to know that the odds did not rest with an entire planet. "
8 " He understands me- how I am. If I forget to come up for air, he reminds me. If i get too literal or too focused, he doesn't take it personally. I'm better at loving him than anyone else, because he never makes me guess what he needs. And because he lets me. "
9 " It's not luck, Waverly. I mean yeah, to find someone who really gets you, maybe that's luck, but if you treat people like they matter, they remember it. "
10 " Autumn is not nobody, but a real, actual force of nature. She is so much more than just some run-of-the-mill person. She's Bette David and Dorothy Parker and Madonna. Autumn is Tyler Durden and Tony Soprano. Autumn is Cthulhu, Destroyer of Worlds. "
11 " The effectiveness of your persona is inversely proportional to what people know about you. "
12 " It's more like they know a language I've never encountered. A dialect you can only speak with someone who actually understands you. "
13 " Why are you so determined to destroy yourself?" I say, and my voice is very small."I don't know," he whispers back. "Why are you? "
14 " I want to be still and small, and not have to man up or act like everything's okay, but the thing about living in a house where someone is sick is, it's like they have a monopoly on it. If one person is always needing things , then no one else is really allowed to. "
15 " How can you do that?" I whisper."Do what?""Just say things- say how you feel."He shrugs. "I don't know. I guess I figure I'm going to regret it either way. Might as well.""That is the saddest thing I've ever heard."He laughs softly in my hair. "Maybe. But its better than not being able to say it at all. "
16 " It's hazardous, though, being that much to someone. When you're the yardstick that everything else is measure against, eventually, you just fail. "
17 " I am insubstantial. A tangled, vaporous creature that lives in my brain, almost wholly imaginary. I can be here with him as easily as I can inhabit a sonnet or an organic molecule, or crawl inside a math problem. "
18 " Look, you don't want to put the power in the hands of the people, okay? You're just going to get three hundred write-in votes for My Dick. "
19 " I have never seen two people so in love, and so completely untouchable. "
20 " The way he's looking at me is like I'm the only beating heart in the world. "