Home > Work > The Summer I Learned to Fly
1 " I thought he might kiss me as we sat shivering on the bank of the spring with our clothes soaked through and our feet dangling in the steaming water. We looked into each other's eyes the way I'd always imagined people did right before they leaned in closer and touched lips for the first time. But that was all we did. We looked at each other. Into each other. We were still clutching hands. "
― Dana Reinhardt , The Summer I Learned to Fly
2 " I'd watched enough TV in the lonely afternoons after school, before there was a cheese shop to go to, to know that there were boys who lied, who knew how to say just the right thing or give you just the right look. Boys who could make you feel a way you thought you didn't deserve to feel. "
3 " As the bus took us north on a connection of dark farm roads and smaller highways, I started to wonder where all the cars were. How could the streets be so empty? How could people sleep when there was so much at stake, so much happening, when there were so many reasons to be awake and alive? And I wondered how it was that I could feel both empty, like these streets, and yet so full at the same time. And those weren't the only contrasting poles inside me. I felt sad and happy. Scared and exhilarated. I felt young and old. "
4 " There are days when I think I don't believe anymore. When I think I've grown too old for miracles. And that's right when another seems to happen. "
5 " I was not boy crazy. Really, I wasn't. But I was lonely, I guess. "
6 " When there's something or someone, when there's anything that makes you happy, you don't let a continent or an ocean or an empty pocket keep you apart "
7 " Friends, I was pretty sure, lift their friends up; they don't weigh them down like a sack full of stones "
8 " We sat looking out at the ocean. There was just so much of it, and it never failed to take my breath away. Looking at the ocean gave me the same sensation I’d get staring at a sky full of stars- that I was small. Like the way a math problem reveals its undeniable truth, I knew when I stared into this sort of endlessness that my life didn’t count for much of anything. And knowing that, that I was nothing but a speck, I felt pretty lucky for all that I had. "
9 " And the person I really wanted to you meet,' he whispered as he pointed to the guitarist, 'is Finn'. Finn was older. He had a beard, for one thing. Strawberry-colored and shaggy. He wore a wool cap over his strawberry hair. His guitar was covered in stickers and his fingers were filled with silver rings. "
10 " Can you hear me, Emmett Crane? You were my first real friend, the first person I really knew, who knew me too, so it doesn't surprise me that I want to say to you the very same things you said to me. Thank you. You saved me from drowning. Because of you, things are better. "