I put my forehead on his collarbone, place one hand on his chest. Its rhythm reassures me: He is real, and he is now.

Live free or die.

Perfection is a promise, and a reassurance that we are not wrong.

He is no longer mine to lose, but the grief is there, a gnawing sense of disbelief.

We wanted the freedom to love. We wanted the freedom to choose. Now we have to fight for it.

And you can't love, not fully, unless you are loved in return.

But maybe happiness isn't in the choosing. Maybe it's in the fiction, in the pretending: that wherever we have ended up is where we intended to be all along.

I don't understand how everything changes, how the layers of your life get buried. Impossible. At some point, at some time, we must all explode.

For a second, I feel a sense of overwhelming grief: for how things change, for the fact that we can never go back. I'm not certain of anything anymore. I don't know what will happen--

This is the past: It drifts, it gathers. If you are not careful, it will bury you.

That is the rule of the Wilds: You must be bigger and stronger and tougher. You must hurt or be hurt.

the measure of achievements in life are directly related to the acquire knowledge, not to the social recognition.

The fashion look of teens and twentysomethings -once so cutting edge- is now, like most of the music played on the radio, a matter of routine. Safe, tired, everywhere.

None so deaf as those that will not hear. None so blind as those that will not see.

Where might is mixed with wit, there is too good an accord in a government.

I sublet place to place with my fiancé. We don't really have a home. I haven't had a proper home for years.

Punctuality is a quality the need of which is bound up with social co-operation.

Short is my date, but deathless my renown.

I feel like, with ski racing, you need to have a short memory. You crash all the time, and sometimes it's a really bad one, but sometimes it's not so bad.

I have tried getting up early, and I have tried getting up late-and the latter agrees with me best.

I live right in the middle of nowhere and I thoroughly enjoy it.