Maybe she was just matter, and matter gets recycled. But ultimately I do not believe that she was only matter. The rest of her must be recycled, too. I believe now that we are greater than the sum of our parts.
Catalog
Miles 'Pudge' Halter
I thought at first that she was just dead. Just darkness. Just a body being eaten by bugs. I thought about her a lot like that, as something's meal. What was her—green eyes, half a smirk, the soft curves of her legs—would soon be nothing, just the bones I never saw. I thought about the slow process…
I felt the heaves of his chest as we realized over and over again that we were still alive. I realized it in waves and we held on to each other crying and I thought, God we must look so lame, but it doesn't much matter when you have just now realized, all the time later, that you are still alive.
We are driving through the place that she could not drive through, passing onto asphalt she never saw, and we are not dead. We are not dead! We are breathing and we are crying and now slowing down and moving back into the right lane.
She didn't leave me enough to discover her, but she left me enough to rediscover the Great Perhaps.
In the beginning, she had haunted me, haunted my dreams, but even now, just weeks later, she was slipping away, falling apart in my memory and everyone else's, dying again.
Memories fall apart, too. And then you're left with nothing, left not even with a ghost but with its shadow.
We are all going.
[She is] a woman so strong she burns heaven and drenches hell.
That is the fear: I have lost something important, and I cannot find it, and I need it. It is fear like if someone lost his glasses and went to the glasses store and they told him that the world had run out of glasses and he would just have to do without.
People, I thought, wanted security. They couldn't bear the idea of death being a big black nothing, couldn't bear the thought of their loved ones not existing, and couldn't even imagine themselves not existing. I finally decided that people believed in an afterlife because they couldn't bear not to.
[I was] feeling—probably for the first time in my life—the fear and excitement of living in a place where you never know what's going to happen or when.
But even in the dark, I could see her eyes--fierce emeralds. She had the kind of eyes that predisposed you to supporting her every endeavor.
I go to seek a Great Perhaps.
You can't just make me different and leave.
The glittering ambiguity of a girl’s smile, which seems to promise an answer to the question but never gives it. The question, the one we’ve all been asking since girls stopped being gross, the question that is too simple to be uncomplicated: Does she like me or like me?
I'd finally had enough of chasing after a ghost who did not want to be discovered. We'd failed, maybe, but some mysteries aren't meant to be solved. I still did not know her as I wanted to, but I never could. She made it impossible for me.
More than anything, I felt the unfairness of it, the inarguable injustice of loving someone who might have loved you back but can't due to deadness.
Suffering is universal. it’s the one thing Buddhists, Christians, and Muslims are all worried about.
You can't just make yourself matter and then die, Alaska, because now I am irretrievably different, and I'm sorry I let you go, yes, but you made the choice. You left me Perhapsless, stuck in your goddamned labyrinth. And now I don't even know if you chose the straight and fast way out, if you left…