God, the boring relative everyone ignores--no one calls, no one writes--until they need a serious favor.

Happiness is a hound dog in the sun. We aren't on Earth to be happy, but to experience incredible things. - Hannah Schneider

I was aware too how strange adults were, how theirs lives were vaster than they wanted anyone to realize, that they actually stretched on and on like deserts, dry and desolate, with an unpredictable, shifting sea of dunes.

For every man there exists bait he cannot resist swallowing.

Just when you think you've hit rock bottom, you realize you're standing on another trapdoor.

She told me her father taught her to live life way beyond the cusp of it, way out in the outer reaches where most people never had the guts to go, where you got hurt. Where there was unimaginable beauty and pain ... They were always reminding themselves to stop measuring life in coffee spoons, mornings and afternoons, to keep swimming way, way down to the bottom of the ocean to find where the mermaids sang, each to each. Where there was danger and beauty and light. Only the now.

Because every one of us has our box, a dark chamber stowing the thing that lanced our heart. It contains what you do everything for, strive for, wound everything around you.