11.14.2010

Quotes from "The Six Rules of Maybe" by Deb Caletti

"[Burnt] toast was plain old good intentions gone awry."

"And a ring, anyway - a ring was a declaration of hope, not a mission accomplished."

"I always thought telling the truth other people was hard, but maybe that was a snap compared to telling the truth to yourself.  Sometimes we just refused to know what we knew."

"If I did that... ...I'd be acting more out of fear than love, wouldn't I?  Fear would make me a liar.  I shouldn't have to be a liar to make someone love me.  I shouldn't be so afraid of losing someone that I'll do anything to make them stay."

"The sky was beautiful and we were both looking at it.  Deep, dark, intense white speckles spread out like the grandest present ever.  'That's it, probably,' he said upward, to the night.  'See there? Those people we want to save? They're the intense flashes of fire across our otherwise empty black sky.'"

"Right then, I realized that other people's 'needs' were sometimes only big nasty demands, in a soft disguise."

"Optimism can get you into a lot of trouble.  You can put your belief in places it doesn't belong.  You can work hard to fix thing that you can't fix.  I'm not sure that kind of optimism is always the best thing.  Positive thinking, hope - it needs better guidelines.  It needs rules."

"There was an equation - the degree to which you hoped and wished for a good outcome multiplied by how wrong it all went equaled the amount of despair."

"Truth was funny, because it was an insistent thing, maybe as powerful and insistent as some force of nature, the push of water or wind.  You could keep it out only so long, but it had its own will and its own needs, and maybe you could keep it at bay with lies, but not for long, not for always."

"Hope could be the most powerful thing or the most useless."

"I stayed silent.  I didn't feel like giving anything anymore, even words.  That's what happens when you give too much.  Suddenly you reach a point of over."

"My heart felt so big and wide.  You could give and give until it hurt you, give without boundaries or self-protection or reciprocation, give out of fear, and it could leave you empty and depleted and even used.  But you could also give out of something very simple - a pure desire - to be kind, and it could double and triple your own joy."

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