Home > Work > Side Effects May Vary
1 " I don't get it - how you can feel like there are no consequences for living with your feelings on your sleeve. "
― Julie Murphy , Side Effects May Vary
2 " Then he left, and with him he took the sun, the moon, the stars, and anything inside of me that might have been good. "
3 " I wanted nothing more than to feel something, but I didn't know how to deal with what came after the feeling. "
4 " In a hundred years, no one would know us, but this moment for us would last as long as we did. "
5 " I’d always heard that when you truly love someone, you’re happy for them as long they’re happy. But that’s a lie. That’s higher-road bullshit. If you love someone so much, why the hell would you be happy to see them with anyone else? I didn’t want the easy kind of love. I wanted the crazy love, the kind of love that created and destroyed all at the same time. "
6 " Does love still exist if you can’t say it? If you can’t admit it? "
7 " En pointe she was a force, a tornado: safe to look at from a distance, but in close proximity, you risked being just another piece of her debris. Some days I thought I could only be so lucky. "
8 " It was the thing I planned out in my head in those moments between asleep and awake when my brain was unable to tell the difference between dreams and reality. "
9 " My whole body finally connected the dots, and I realized that even if we were never together, she’d ruined me and I’d never feel that way about anyone again. "
10 " This feeling that the world was so pleased to call love destroyed people every day and it would do that to me too. "
11 " But now I felt trapped, like a homeless person who’d been given their dream home only to suffer from intense wanderlust because we always want something until we have it. "
12 " But I wondered sometimes, the way your mind asks those big questions, like whether or not there’s a god or how a girl can think she’s ugly one day and pretty the next. "
13 " Dr. Meredith was a large, robust man, and jolly too, with rosy cheeks and this perpetual baby-powder smell. I always thought he would be better suited as a Santa Claus at the Green Oaks Mall rather than a doctor charged with the duty of delivering earth-shattering news. Maybe his appearance was supposed to soften the blow. The bad news is you have cancer. The good news is Santa Claus is your doctor. Peppermint stick for your trouble? "
14 " You care for me?" My jaw twitched. "Alice, I- I care about our principal, and my boss, and the lady at the donut shop who gives me extra donut holes. But I love you," I spat. "And you know what that feels like? It's like a fucking cheese grater against my heart. "
15 " She had this way, when she wasn't talking about foreign politics or global warming, of making sense of all the complex things I never knew how to describe. "
16 " a hundred years, no one would know us, but this moment for us would last as long as we did. This. Right now, with traces of Alice coloring my view of the sky, would never be in a history book or a movie, but for as long as I could push air in and out of my chest, I would remember this moment that could never be measured. "
17 " Actually, at home, my parents simply referred to him as “bro. "
18 " I wanted to be honest with you, Alice. But then you got sick. I couldn’t do that to you. "