”Weird how we're programmed to get pleasure from destroying ourselves.”

~Jeff Zentner, Goodbye Days.

”My mind twirls with mysteries. The eternities. Life. Death. I can't stop it. It's like staring in the mirror for too long or saying your name too many times and becoming disconnected from any sense of yourself. I begin to wonder if I'm even still alive; if I exist.”

~Jeff Zentner, Goodbye Days.

”Grief is weird. It seems to come in these waves out of nowhere. One minute I'm standing in the ocean, fine. The next minute I'm drowning.”

~Jeff Zentner, Goodbye Days.

”Sometimes, though, you want to remember every minute you spent with someone. You want to remember even the most mundane moments. You wish you had inhabited them more completely, and marked them with yourself more indelibly - not in spite of their ordinariness, but because of it. But you only discover this when it's too late.”

~Jeff Zentner, Goodbye Days.

For the most part, you don't hold the people you love in your heart because they rescued you from drowning or pulled you from a burning house. Mostly you hold them in your heart because they save you, in a million quiet and perfect ways, from being alone.

~Jeff Zentner, Goodbye Days.

The fact is, I was sick, but not in an easily explained flu kind of way. It's my experience that people are a lot more sympathetic if they can see you hurting, and for the millionth time in my life I wish for measles or smallpox or some other recognizable disease just to make it simple for me and also for them. Anything would be better than the truth.

~Jennifer Niven, All The Bright Places.

A string of thoughts run through my head like a song I can't get rid of, over and over in the same order: I am broken. I am a fraud. I am impossible to love.

~Jennifer Niven, All the Bright Places.

My beloved boat is broken on the rocks of daily life. I’ve paid my debts and no longer need to count pains I’ve suffered at the hands of others. The misfortunes and the insults. Good luck to those who remain.

~Jennifer Niven, All the Bright Places.

You don’t know how it is. It’s like I’ve got this angry little person inside me, and I can feel him trying to get out. He’s running out of room because he’s growing bigger and bigger, and so he starts rising up, into my lungs, chest, throat, and I just push him right back down. I don’t want him to come out. I can’t let him out.

~Jennifer Niven, All The Bright Places.

I should be happy, but instead I feel nothing. I feel a lot of nothing these days. I've cried a few times, but mostly I'm empty, as if whatever makes me feel and hurt and laugh and love has been surgically removed, leaving me hollowed out like a shell.

~Jennifer Niven, All The Bright Places.