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"I've learned to get really good at this - say one thing when I'm thinking about something else, act like I'm listening when I'm not, pretend to be calm and happy when I'm really freaking out. It's one of the skills you perfect as you get older."
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"Maybe Lindsay and I are best friends and we hate each other, both. Maybe I'm only one math class away from being a slut like Anna Cartullo. Maybe I am like her, deep down. Maybe we all are: just one lunch period away from eating alone in the bathroom. I wonder if it's ever really possible to know the truth about someone else, or if the best we can do is just stumble into each other, heads down, hoping to avoid collision."
Friendship
"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."
Survival
"Let me tell you something about dying: it's not as bad as they says.it's the coming-back-to-life part that hurts."
Mortality
"Sometimes I feel like if you just watch things, just sit still and let the world exist in front of you - sometimes I swear that just for a second time freezes and the world pauses in its tilt. Just for a second. And if you somehow found a way to live in that second, then you would live forever."
Time
"Lindsay calls them the Pugs: pretty from far away, ugly up close."
Truth
"Take it from me: If you hear the past speaking to you, feel it tugging up your back and runing its fingers up your spine, the best thing to do-the only thing-is run."
Memory
"The DFA and organizations like it have pushed and squeezed and elbowed out all the feeling in the world. They have clamped their fists around a geyser to keep it from exploding.But the pressure eventually builds, and the explosion will always come."
Struggle
"It's the rule of the wilds. You must be bigger, and stronger, and tougher. A coldness radiates through me, a solid wall that is growing, piece by piece, in my chest. He doesn't love me.He never loved me.It was all a lie."The old Lena is dead." I say, and then push past him. Each step is more difficult than the last; the heaviness fills me and turns my limbs to stone.You must hurt or be hurt."
Strength
"You should only fall in love with people who will fall in love with you back."
Romance
"They couldn't have known that even this was a lie-that we never really choose, not entirely. We are always being pushed and squeezed down one road or another. We have no choice but to step forward, and then step forward again, and then step forward again; suddenly we find ourselves on a road we haven't chosen at all.But maybe happiness isn't in the choosing. Maybe it's in the fiction, in the pretending: that wherever we have ended up is where we intended to be all along."
Happiness
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"Marianne had now been brought by degrees, so much into the habit of going out every day, that it was become a matter of indifference to her, whether she went or not: and she prepared quietly and mechanically for every evening's engagement, though without expecting the smallest amusement from any, and very often without knowing, till the last moment, where it was to take her."
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Personal Development
"Most if not all sexually active people do not really love having sex, they merely love experiencing an orgasm every now and then."
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Personal Development
". . . confirmed libertines don't reform until they're tired . . ."
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Personal Development
"It's easy finding reasons why other folks should be patient."
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Personal Development
"People have a natural tendency to anthropomorphize their pets, to ascribe human perceptions and intentions to the animal where none exist."
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Personal Development
"Consider how others may feel about you before, during, and after talking. Are you projecting an attitude that results in others feeling accepted and welcome? Are you encouraging people to speak and engage with you through your approachability?"
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Personal Development
"Timid people always reek their peevishness on the gentle."
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Personal Development
"Rather than the one who gets angry, the world is more afraid of the one who does not get angry. Why? When anger ceases, grandeur of authority (pratap) arises. Such is the law of nature. Otherwise there would never be any protection for those who don't get angry. Anger provides protection during one's conduct in ignorance of the self."
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Personal Development
"A man in drink can be like a ravening wolf."
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Personal Development
"Darkness dwells within even the best of us. In the worst of us, darkness not only dwells but reins."
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Personal Development
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