That’s a funny thing: you think, when awful things happen, everything else just stops, like you would forget to pee and eat and get thirsty, but it’s not really true. It’s like you and your body are two separate things, like your body is betraying you, chugging on, idiotic and animal, craving water and sandwiches and bathroom breaks while your world falls apart.

What is beauty? Beauty is no more than a trick; a delusion; the influence of excited particles and electrons colliding in your eyes, jostling in your brain like a bunch of overeager school children, about to be released on break. Will you let yourself be deluded? Will you let yourself be decieved? -"On Beauty and Falsehood," The New Philosophy, by Ellen Dorpshire

Most things, even the greatest movements on earth, have their beginnings in something small. An earthquake that shatters a city might begin with a tremble, a breath. Music begins with a vibration . . . And God created the whole universe from an atom no bigger than a thought.

And when we are with Alex, I might as well not be there. They speak in a language of whispers and giggles and secrets; their words are like a fairy-tale tangle of thorns, which place a wall between us.

What glitters may not be gold; and even wolves may smile; and fools will be led by promises to their deaths.

Who knows? Maybe they’re right. Maybe we are driven crazy by our feelings. Maybe love is a disease, and we would be better off without it. But we have chosen a different road. And in the end that is the point of escaping the cure: We are free to choose. We are even free to choose the wrong thing.

So far I've seen the life studies packet used as (1) an umbrella, (2) a makeshift towel, (3) a pillow, and now this. I have never actually seen anyone study with it, which either means that everyone who graduates from Thomas Jefferson will be totally unprepared for life or that certain things can't be learned in bullet-point format.