Always' was a promise! How can you just break the promise?" "Sometimes people don't always understand the promises they're making when they make them," I said. Isaac shot me a look. "Right, of course. But you keep the promise anyway. That's what love is. Love is keeping the promise anyway. Don't you believe in true love?" I didn't answer. I didn't have an answer. But I thought that if true love did exist, that was a pretty good definition of it.

She would stay on the road and in hiding, a balloon floating through the sky, eating up hundreds of miles a day with a help of the perpetual tailwind.

When you acknowledge that there is nothing repulsive or unforgivable or shameful about yourself, it becomes easier to be that authentic person and feel like you're living a less performed life.

The fourth way to get a boy to like you is to be yourself. Now, I am contractually obligated as an adult to give that advice, even though it doesn't work. But yeah, be yourself, even though no one has any idea what it means to be yourself. Like whose self would I otherwise be being?

Without Pain, How Could We Know Joy?

It felt like everything was rising up in me, like I was drowning in this weirdly painful joy, but I couldn't say it back. I just looked at him and let him look at me until he nodded, lips pursed and turned away, placing the side of his head against the window.

The internet is necessarily public. It can be filtered-public or censored-public, but it necessarily has to be open and available.