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Without the truth, there can be no fiction.
Nonsense needs reason. To push against. I didn't howl at the moon, I yelled at a lamp. Subject verb. Someone wept. Some things are more important than poetry.

When you build on a graveyard everything is a graveyard, and everything is a graveyard because nothing is free from history. It foods the landscape, it burns the cities to the ground. Tell someone to get over it and you've made yourself an enemy, but you have to get over it. There is no room, there is no new room. The fire is not moving away. The smoke billows.

Galileo got a telescope. He used it to move the sun to the center of the universe. We arrested him and banned his books. Socrates had a question. Well, several questions. We gave him poison. Van Gogh had a paintbrush. He struggled with yellow. He was 700 things on a small shelf, touching. When he died he was survived by everything that was left.

When they wake, it's dark. They cry, the moon rises, the pebbles shine—my father does not like this part-and by dawn, they're back. This is the part that I don't like: They went back. When someone is trying to kill you, you shouldn't go back. Second night, same plot: Ditch the kids.
They are the parents. They don't need to be inventive. The door is locked. No pebbles.

Surely it was a misunderstanding, a simple sloppiness. It wasn't. It was a staircase down and darker.

No one believes that I know what I know because sometimes I miss a part or tell it sideways. Some people get stuck on the first thing you say and they don't let you finish your syllogism. They asked the wrong questions. I gave the wrong answers.

"You're like a rose in a graveyard," he said, and his lips twisted into a bitter smile. "I wonder what you could have turned into without the war."

I didn't know what would happen when we first met. I didn't know that it'd be a lifetime. I hoped it would, I think. At least part of me did. I couldn't even tell you why. But there was something about you, something I wanted…There's no fate, no destiny. Sometimes it is horrible, devastating. But sometimes, it could lead to a life we couldn't have predicted. A good life, even if it hurts.

Coming together to make something so impossible, something so human, and then sending it to the stars. We filled it with so much of what makes us tick that it's overwhelming. But isn't it a lie? Say that the records are found. They're listened to. Were heard, even though there's no one left to confirm. What will those beings think? That we were loving, kind, and hopeful? Is that what we deserve?

She talks to the locals as though she invented them.

I wonder when I will catch up to the life that started the moment I lost you.

Deep in the summer, there will be mornings so sunny and bright that I won't feel anything but grateful, and I won't do anything but smile. I hold on to this thought on mornings like this, when the day stretches out ahead of me, intimidatingly empty.

I can't help but get lonely for you when I’m supposed to be happy. It feels inescapable. If I can't even enjoy myself in the good times, then when am I going to enjoy myself? When is the weight of all this going to go away?

I always seem to be one emotion away from what everyone else is feeling. I want to be on the same page as everyone. To have an identical experience of reality. To be moored to the same comprehensible and solid emotions as they are.

Lily could look at Kath forever, but looking was not enough. She wanted nothing more than to touch Kath, but the space between them seemed to buzz warningly. They were on top of Russian Hill now, on top of the city itself, completely exposed.

“Where?” Lily asked. “Where can we go?”

It was a senseless sort of dance, artful and confused. Blue and Maura had their own orbit; Maura and Calla another. He watched Maura's bare feet circle on the kitchen floor. It was the opposite of everything he had cultivated for the past five years. How he wanted to stay. This isn't a life for what you are, he told himself. But for tonight, he would pretend.

This lived in him. This punch, the first time his father had ever hit him, was always being thrown somewhere in his head.

He didn't want to kidnap a boy, he didn't want to anger Maura, he wanted...he just wanted. Cicadas sang madly from the trees. It was so impossibly summer. He wanted to stay.

She beamed at him. She had one of those lovely, open, perfect smiles, genuinely happy and very beautiful. The Gray Man thought, This is the worst decision I've ever made.

“There wasn't a day during his first month at Aglionby Academy when he hadn't doubted his decision to come there. The other boys were so alien and daunting; he would never be able to look like one of them. How incredibly naive he'd been to think he would ever possess a room like one of the other Aglionby students did.” Me @ Rollins

He looked nothing like the Adam who'd lost his temper and everything like the Adam she had first met. That was what was frightening, though — there d been no warning.

Noah had not been Catholic when he was alive, but recently he had decided to find religion. No one in the church ever noticed him and it was possible God didn't, either, but Ronan, as someone God possibly ignored as well, didn't mind the company.

Adam knew it was a favor. Did that make it wrong? He'd said no for so long that he didn't know when to say yes…He hated the careful way Gansey had asked him about it. Tiptoeing, just like Adam had learned to tiptoe around his father. He needed a reset button. Just push the reset button on Adam Parrish and start him again.

Sometimes Ronan thought Adam was so used to the right way being painful that he doubted any path that didn't come with agony.

Really, for a man who had been out of practice for so many years, it was a splendid laugh, a most illustrious laugh. The father of a long, long line of brilliant laughs!

"They are not torn down," cried Scrooge, folding one of his bed curtains in his arms. "They are not torn down, rings and all. They are here—I am here-the shadows of the things that would have been may be dispelled. They will be. I know they will!"

“…This boy is Ignorance. This girl is Want. Beware of them both, and all of their degree, but most of all beware this boy, for on his brow I see that written which is doom, unless the writing be erased. Deny it!" cried the spirit, stretching out its hand toward the city. "Slander those who tell it ye! Admit it for your factious purposes, and make it worse! And bide the end!"

"Business!" cried the ghost, wringing its hands again.
"Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence were, all, my business. The dealings of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my busi-ness!"

He lived in chambers which had once belonged to his deceased partner. They were a gloomy suite of rooms, in a lowering pile of building up a yard, where it had so little business to be, that one could scarcely help fancying it must have run there when it was a young house, playing at hide-and-seek with other houses, and have forgotten the way out again. It was old enough now, and dreary enough…

But what did Scrooge care? It was the very thing he liked. To edge his way along the crowded paths of life, warning all human sympathy to keep its distance, was what the knowing ones call "nuts" to Scrooge.