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1 " Life’s fucked up. It just is. It’s got ups and downs and I say it’s worse not appreciating the good things, because then what’s the point? It’s like the Native Americans used to say, right? Gotta use all of the buffalo. Life is a whole damn animal, and you can’t waste any part of it. "
― Chuck Wendig , The Book of Accidents
2 " In horror’s wake, hope was a bountiful garden. "
3 " He doesn’t belong here. He came one night during a bad storm. Been a plague ever since. "
4 " …he’d subsumed a whole new identity. Into each world he went, he became someone slightly new to appeal to the Oliver of that place: sculpting himself into a key that fit into the hole in every Oliver’s heart. "
5 " life is strange. It’s full of mistakes and regrets, and our minds are very good at bringing those out at the worst times, the times when we’re most vulnerable. Like dreams. The best we can do, I think, is to figure out how to move forward. How we correct the errors that we made to give some peace to ourselves. "
6 " Books were usually a way for her to power her own brain down and borrow someone else’s for a while. "
7 " You ever think with the way the world is, it’s irresponsible to bring a kid into it? It’s like, this fucking president and climate change and god, what else? Antibiotics are failing and they say all the bugs are dying and the coral reefs, too. Countries are building up their nuclear arsenals instead of paring them down. I just…shit, a new kid might be a burden on this world, and this world will sure as hell end up a burden on our kid. "
8 " the sound of it nearly lost to the zipper-unzipping buzz of the cicadas. "
9 " The mind is less precarious than we think it is, Nate. Often, I believe it is our fear of losing it that’s more dangerous than actually losing it, if you’ll follow my logic. The fear of a thing is quite often worse than the thing we fear, "
10 " I’m just saying, nobody does anything. And the shootings keep coming. Malls, movie theaters, churches, synagogues, fuckin’ everywhere. If the needle didn’t move for a bunch of dead elementary schoolkids, it’s never gonna move. "
11 " The tunnel became the place of dares:Kids said that if you walked the tunnel at midnight, you might hear a train whistle, and if you didn’t run the half-mile length of darkness at top speed, the conductor would ride along in his ghost train and-Choo-choo, chopity-chop.Cut your head off too. "
12 " we’re a blend, all of us, a cocktail peanut mix of niceness and badness, all bound up in a bundle of inexcusable indolence and ignorance punctuated by unanticipated moments of genuine heroism "
13 " Sometimes the work emerged out of intent—the desire to make a specific thing. But just as often, what she created was not of her design, but, rather, was like archaeology: It was more of an uncovering, as if the artist’s job was simply to find what the material was trying to hide. And then wrestle it to the surface, so that all could see. Or, in her case, cut the trapped spirit free. "
14 " Pain is a part of who we are. You can’t destroy it, and you can’t hide from it. "
15 " Or maybe, just maybe, he got it into his head that he was doing something good. Something righteous. Some of the worst things are done under righteous pretense. "
16 " Follow the right wall. Right meaning the direction—pick the wall to the right of you and keep following it, and if it dead-ends, you stay on the right and turn around. Ultimately in this way, a maze would stretch out like a line—or was it a circle?—and you would find your way to its end. "
17 " Human sacrifice has power,” he said. “The world has long understood that, but now it pretends to know differently—ohh, we’re all so buttoned-up, pretending we don’t do those things anymore, even though we sacrifice the homeless on our cold streets, or migrant children at the border, or the poor at every turn. "
18 " she’s paranoid about having ‘strange teenagers’ around Cousin Reg.” He lowered his voice. “Especially white kids. You white boys are all school shooters and shit. "
19 " I know art when I see it, but I don’t make it. Some people are makers, others are vampires—that’s me. We grow fat on your ideas and imagination. I’m just a beautiful tapeworm, darling… "
20 " Sensible. I’d have done the same damn thing—er, were I not a bleeding-heart liberal. Not that I have a problem with commonsense gun ownership, friend, not at all! I just don’t think I could do it. Point it. Pull the trigger. Turns my blood to water, the thought of it. I "
