Elsewhere by Gabrielle Zevin

• A quick end is a good end.
• In the end, the end of a life only matters to friends, family, and other folks you used to know. For everyone else, it's just another end.
• What a waste, she thinks, to spend one's dreams asleep.
• How long does a dream have to last before it's just life?
• You could drive yourself crazy with ifs.
• People who are happy don't really need to ask themselves if they are happy or not, do they? They just are happy, she thinks.
• Your last words are somehow meant to encapsulate your entire existence.
• Liz shakes her head, vowing to omit um and all equally meaningless words (uh, like, huh, sorta, kinda, oh, hey, maybe) from her vocabulary.
• Did you know that there are over three hundred words for love in Canine?
• Even when the body is well, you still find that the mind...Well, the mind has a mind of its own.
• Dead is little more than a state of mind. Many people on Earth spend their whole lives dead.
• The point is the journey.
• Be happy! It's easier to be happy than to be sad. Being sad takes a lot of work. It's exhausting.
• A man should always be as honest as he can.
• Liz finds telling lies easy now that she's started. The only problem (as many before Liz have discovered) is that she has to keep telling more and more of them.
• People, you'll find, aren't usually all good or all bad. Sometimes they're a little bit good and a whole lot bad. And sometimes, they're mostly good with a dash of bad. And most of us, well, we fall in the middle somewhere.
• The only way to absolutely ensure things will go badly is to be late.
• Life is better with a little adventure.
• It's difficult to ever go back to the same places or people. You turn away, even for a moment, and when you turn back around, everything's changed.
• Is it weird to like something and not even know why you like it?
• As many have discovered, it is entirely possible (though not particularly desirable) to love two people with all your heart. It is entirely possible to long for two lives, to feel that one life can't come close to containing it all.
• What's Shakespeare say? "The course of true love never did run smooth."
• You'll find that the world has a way of working things out.
• Just because someone did something before doesn't mean they have to do it still.
• Saying you're through with romance is like saying you're done with living. Life is better with a little romance, you know.
• If you are going to forgive a person, Liz decides, it is best to do it sooner rather than later. Later, Liz knows from experience, could be sooner than you thought.
• There will be other lives. There will be other lives for nervous boys with sweaty palms, for bittersweet fumblings in the backseats of cars, for caps and gowns in royal blue and crimson, for mothers clasping pretty pearl necklaces around daughters' unlined necks, for your full name read aloud in an auditorium, for brand-new suitcases transporting you to strange new people in strange new lands. And there will be other lives for unpaid debts, for one-night stands, for Prague and for Paris, for painful shoes with pointy toes, for indecisions and revisions. And there will be other lives for fathers walking daughters down aisles. And there will be other lives for sweet babies with skin like milk. And there will be other lives for a man you don't recognize, for a face in a mirror that is no longer yours, for the funerals of intimates, for shrinking, for teeth that fall out, for hair on your chin, for forgetting everything. Everything. Oh, there are so many lives. How we wish we could live them concurrently instead of one by one by one. We could select the best pieces of each, stringing them together like a strand of pearls. But that's not how it works. A human's life is a beautiful mess.
• Happiness is a choice.
• When one is happy, time passes quickly.
• A life isn't measured in hours and minutes. It's the quality, not the length.
• I believe good things happen every day. I believe good things happen even when bad things happen.

1/17/2010--11:08 pm