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If I think she' hot and it turns out she's a psychopath, then what does that say about me? I'm totally not ready for that kind of therapy.
Barry Lyga -
...called nine-one-one," Howie was saying, "and then I heard something in the alleyway, so I went back there and" --Howie coughed-- "and valiantly attacked his knife with my guts, to no avail." "Did you get a good look at him? Could you describe him?" Howie smiled wanly. "Yeah. He was about yay long" --he held up his hands, four inches apart-- "thin, made of steel. Pointy. Sharp.
Barry Lyga
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You can't rely on love. Love will let you down every time. Every. Single. Time. I don't love Jecca. I don't love Fanboy. But... God, the buts in life will kill you absolutely every time, won't they. I don't love. But I need. I can admit that to myself.
Barry Lyga -
In baseball, when you get into the batter's box, that's it. It's just you. It's one man against the world. All that matters in that moment is your individual achievement and your individual skill. There is literally nothing that anyone else on your team can do for you. Hell, they're all sitting on the bench, waiting to see what happens, just like the fans in the crowd! It's just you and your bat. And the ball.
Barry Lyga -
Yes, pain meant life. But the symmetric property did not apply; Life did not mean pain.
Barry Lyga -
Anger was a waste of time and energy. Anger was useless."Anger" was the label given to the emotion that accomplished nothing.
Barry Lyga -
You don't swing at any pitch. You swing at the ones you can hit.
Barry Lyga -
She was made up of skin and bones and hate and crazy, and hate and crazy don't weigh anything.
Barry Lyga
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Don't be stupid. You're a child. You don't know what it means to be in love." And she flung open the car door as if she wished she had the strength to rip it from the hinges, and stalked off to the house through the rain. That night, I lay in bed, troubled by what she'd said, blocking out the sounds of argument from my parents' room. Was love what my parents had? Yelling at eachother, worrying about money? Never smiling? Never happy? If that was love, then I didn't want it.
Barry Lyga -
Here’s the thing about baseball-it’s not the individual sport I thought it was. Turns out I was wrong about that. Yeah, the batter is a lone man against the world. He stands in the batter’s box like a soldier and it’s up to him-and him alone-what happens next. But here’s the thing I didn’t understand until I was forced to, until recently: In order to hit a home run… Someone else has to pitch the ball.
Barry Lyga -
It's like this," he'd explained once to Connie. "If someone gave you a single rose, you'd be happy, right?" "Okay," he went on, "Now imagine someone gives you ten thousand roses." "That is a whole lotta roses," she said. "That's too much." "Right. Too much. But more than that, it makes each individual rose much less special, right? It makes it hard to pick one out and say, 'That's the good one.' And it makes you want to just get rid of them all because none of them seem special now." Connie had narrowed her eyes. "Are you saying when you're at school you just want to get rid of everyone?
Barry Lyga -
I don't know and I don't care anymore. I was supposed to have my way for once, just once in my life. I did everything right and I got nothing for it. I want to kill them all. no, better yet, I want to die. No, even bettter than that: I want to kill them all then die.
Barry Lyga -
Are you stalking me, Mr. Fulton?" The idea both amused and horrified Jazz.
Barry Lyga -
Homecoming's stupid." And it is. Buch of kids looking for excuses to grope eachother all night.
Barry Lyga
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Jazz spent a chunk of the day fantasizing about ways to kill his grandmother, plotting them and planning them in the most excruciating, gruesome detail his imagination would allow. It turned out his imagination allowed quite a bit. He spent the rest of the day convincing himself--over and over--not to do it.
Barry Lyga -
One time you told me that the opposite of love isn't hate. And I didn't understand that, but I think I do know. Because if you hate someone, you most still care, right? You have to care a little bit; otherwise you would just ignore them and forget they even live. Or lived.
Barry Lyga -
Fear can keep you alive. The trick is not to let it overwhelm you. Not to let it rule you. If you’re afraid, that’s the universe trying to tell you something. Get away. Don’t run; don’t panic. Just pick up and walk out, calm as you please. Panic makes you stupid.
Barry Lyga -
What was the opposite of linkage blindness? What described being certain of something without any kind of evidence?...The term was faith.
Barry Lyga -
A river of images and thoughts and feelings, dirtied and polluted so that no one could drink from it without gagging.
Barry Lyga -
And it's true. It's so true. All those years of loving Zik because he never asked about Eve... I never realized, I never understood. It was his job as my best friend not to ask. But it was my job as his best friend to tell him without being asked.
Barry Lyga
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It just means that if someone hates you, they still have feelings for you. If they really didn't care about you, they'd just forget about you. They wouldn't even waste the time hating you.
Barry Lyga -
See, forgiveness doesn't happen all at once. It's not an event - it's a process.
Barry Lyga -
Unreal. I'm feeling nostalgic for something that happened less than twenty-four hours ago. This has got to be a record.
Barry Lyga -
It's not an easy choice, but that's OK. Easy doesn't equal good. Difficulty doesn't equal bad. It's just life, is all.
Barry Lyga