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I DIDNT KNOW THEY STARTED DATING WHAT

the meows are killing me

did not expect a “would your friends help you cover up a murder” plot

don’t know much abt how linguists thought back then but some of the lectures and approaches feel very modern, like how a linguistic prof would teach today

"By the time they'd finished their tea, they were almost in love with each other - not quite yet, because true love took time and memories, but as closed to love as first impressions could take them… But that afternoon they could see with certainty the kind of friends they would be, and loving that vision was close enough.”

koi no yokan

john green is the only audiobook narrator i will listen to on 1x speed

"You write in fiction, Nikolai said.
Yes.
Then you can make up whatever you want.
One never makes up things in fiction, I said. One had to live there as one has to live here.
Here is where you are, not where I am. I am in fiction, he said. I am fiction now."

"But you have to know she was only writing a poem. Just as you're writing stories here.
Yes, I said, but poems and stories are trying to speak what can't be spoken.
You always say words fall short, he said.
Words fall short, yes, but sometimes their shadow reach the unspeakable."

"People say that about the dead, that they need to be protected, only because people need an excuse for their own timidity.
How so?
Because they don't know what the dead want. And they're afraid of knowing, Nikolai said.
They're afraid of now knowing, too, I said."

"Writing fiction is to eavesdrop on your characters' heart."

"A mind that sees no path or direction to flee despair can be expanded nevertheless. Who can say if expansion may not one day make despair sufferable? I wish I could still leave some books on his desk...
Oh don't wish, he said. Wishing only wounds the heart.
What's the harm of spending a few minutes lost in wishing, I thought, when the deepest wound would remain open, day and night."

"For years he has asked me: If you write about suffering, if you understand suffering, why did you give me life? I has never given him an answer good enough."

perhaps all the reasons (happiness? hope? wonder?) despite, in spite of, the suffering is good enough for most people

"How do you know if someone wants to be in your dream? [Nikolai]
...Alas, I don't know. No one has a choice when others decide to capture him or her in their dreams.
So fundamentally dreaming is injustice inflicted upon whomever is being dreamed of?
Sometimes self-inflicted injustice, I said. People you want nothing to do with still come into your dreams."

"In my dream Nikolai was wearing his favorite blue-striped T-shirt. Mommy, I'm hungry, he said to me. The moment I heard him I woke up. Before reality and unreality were separated like night and say, darkness and lightness, I lived over and over again with his smile and his voice in my head."

"Time doesn't make sense if not for the perishable, he said."

reminded me of "There is mercy / in the way milk sours. Convenience / in the way we throw our spoils / away." ("Ode to Emptiness" by Sally Wen Mao)

"Just as none of us could go back, re-measuring the ingredients that made up days and years, repeating the steps with more care, hoping to eliminate the errors, hoping not to make new mistakes, so that this story would have turned out differently. And Nikolai would still be alive."

"What do you call a place between somewhere and nowhere? I asked.
Between somewhere and nowhere—on some days that place feels more abysmal than on other days.
Anywhere between somewhere and nowhere would still be somewhere, he said.
Are you somewhere too?
Of course, he said. Nowhere is like infinity and beyond. It's possible to be closer if you try. It's impossible to arrive nowhere."

"I've never called life unlivable, he said. I've ever lived a single day without something that matters to me, something I live for."

"I wonder if fear is what keeps people going in life, I said.
Most people would say hope is a more suitable noun there, he said.
Who can tell the difference between hope and fear?
That's a good muddleheaded question."

"I don't mind that life is not perfect. I do mind that I cannot perfect myself in an imperfect life.
Perfection is like a single snowflake, I said. It melts.
A perfectionist melts too, Mommy."

"You're only thinking back from a different place and adding your feelings, Nikolai said.
No, I protested. Some memories cannot be revised. They are what they are."

"If there is one thing to make fun of, I said, it's how quickly we grownups are at a loss for words in an unfamiliar or unwanted situation."

"Nikolai's death was a difficult thing for people to talk about, but his friends, when they wrote, did not have to resort to the ready words because of helplessness, awkwardness, or politeness. They wrote from a place where Nikolai was still one of them and where they were told that he was no longer one of them."

"It'd be preposterous to say I know anything about you now, I said. I used to say one can know a person without understanding him, but I've never thought the opposite can be true, too, until now.
You understand me without knowing me? he asked.
Let's face it. Death is a divide no matter how little you and I believe its power to separate."

"So memories are like cells, always replaced by new ones?
I thought about it. Without replacements would his memories now remain unfaded and unfadable? Were they becoming part of his omniscience?"

"Did I tell you about this man we visited for grief counseling? He asked us to imagine the universe as a giant cauldron of molecular soup. These molecules here make this table, those molecules there made Nikolai, I said, imitating the doctor, and began to laugh.
If he made you laugh wouldn't you consider him effective?
Upon entering his office the man also said, I sense suffering coming..."

"...if we're willing, we can pick out ay number of statements from any number of books and find them comforting."

"Even the least optimistic person wants to have some hope.
Wouldn't that be wishful thinking, the hope you talk about?
Possibly.
If you understand it as wishful thinking, why are you still sad then?
Why, I said. Because preparing is not experiencing. Pre-living is not living. I will be sad today and tomorrow, a week from now, a year from now. I will be sad forever."

"The unspeakable is a wound that stays open always, always, and forever... There is no good language when it comes to the unspeakable, I thought. There is no precision, no originality, no perfection."

"He ate his blueberries in a Little Prince mug I had bought for him in Paris, with a tiny silver spoon. No adjective could describe the mug, the spoon, and the last bag of frozen blueberries that we could not touch now. How long does it take for the frozen to become fossil?
I've begun to understand, I said, why people hold on to things."