If you can’t be strong, you have to be smart. And smart is better than strong
Sayfa 38Kitabı okudu
“There is no Lord,” Dad said. “God’s just a lie the powerful people tell the little people to keep them in line.”
Sayfa 60Kitabı okudu
knowing when to rest is as important as knowing when to work
Sayfa 69Kitabı okudu
I don’t know that I believe people are good or bad all at once,” he said. “We’re all a collection of our choices. Good choices, bad choices, choices that don’t look one way or another when you’re making them.
Sayfa 74Kitabı okudu
I can do it , I tell myself. It’s not complicated, it’s just hard.
Sayfa 164Kitabı okudu
I don’t need to figure it all out, or else . There is no or else , no happy ending if I try hard enough. This only ends one way. It’s like shrugging off a heavy backpack. It seems like giving up hope should mean despairing, but I feel light. Hope is a distraction. It makes you think about things that might happen to save you, instead of what’s right in front of you. It makes you freeze up because you’re so afraid of failing, because you don’t understand yet that it doesn’t matter.
Sayfa 187Kitabı okudu
I’m spending all this time thinking about other people, but I’ve never really expected that they’re thinking about me. Forgotten is the most alone you can get.
Sayfa 214Kitabı okudu
Things can change in an instant. If you aren’t ready, they won’t give you the courtesy of a second chance.
Sayfa 220Kitabı okudu
They think I’m wounded, but there is a difference between a wound and a scar. I’m done bleeding. I’m tougher now. And if these scars sometimes make things stiff, make it a little harder to move smoothly through a conversation or the routines of normal life, they just keep me from forgetting.
Sayfa 271Kitabı okudu
when I find a moment of sudden silence, I shut my eyes. And in that moment I am back in the woods, back in the lake. My forest around me, a kingdom that I understand. A place that does not love me and that I do not love. But we don’t expect love from each other, the wild and me. We only want to survive.
And I did. And I will.
My name is Jess Cooper, and I am still alive.
Sayfa 272Kitabı okudu
Primordial cell
I want to give only a very brief explanation of this. There are three possibilities for a cell; the first is death, the second is cell division; the third is fusion: a union, a merging with another cell, which almost always causes a division. Neither division nor union means death: it is a reproductive process, the changing of one living cell into two living cells that are virtually the same. They are both the living continuations of the original cell. The primordial cell came into being billions of years ago, and the primordial cell has survived in the form of trillions of cells. And it lives on still in every single one of all the cells alive now. And all life, everything that has ever lived and everything that is alive today, is the result of divisions of the primordial cell. It is therefore composed of the primordial cell, which is still alive. These are matters that no biologist can dispute and that no biologist will dispute. We are all the primordial cell, in a very similar sense (genidentity) to that in which I am the same person now as I was thirty years ago, even though perhaps not one atom of my present body existed in my body in those days.
I love Girl. I will explain what that is. When I look at her, I feel sick like I am going to die. I have never had the Great Disease (obviously, because I am still alive.) But my Uncle described it to me. He said there is a tightness in your chest, you cannot breathe, and you have anger towards the Gods because they are hurting you for no reason. I was going to ask him to explain more, but then he died. (He had been sick a long time, almost two days.) My point is: Girl makes me feel this way, like I am going to die. There are many women in the world. By last count, seven. But she is the only one I ever think about.
