Amy Zhang Quotes

I remember threading my fingers through his and pressing our life lines together

There are things worth dying for.

Miracles do not belong to religions. Miracles belong to the desperate, which is why every religion, every philosophy, and most importantly, every fairy tale always has a moment of salvation, a eureka, an enlightenment. We are all chasing and chasing tails, running and running in circles, until a wolf or the witch or the stepmother jumps out and trips us, and we fall flat, splat, and we lie bare and bleeding and breathless and finally, finally look and see whatever it is---salvation or eureka or enlightenment or a hunter or prince or a glass slipper---in front of us. And that's what miracles are. Not solutions, but catalysts. Not answers, but chances.

Lesson learned: bad things happen to good people.

But she needed ice on the roads. She needed her accident to look as accidental as possible. And she just didn't think she was capable of waiting another three months. Julia, however, knows none of this. She looks down at what remains of her best friend, and she thinks of all the times Liz was quiet and not really there. The times when she was the Liz everyone else knows, all snark and insanity, and the moments when she was the one that stared at invisible things and hadn't truly smiled in a long time.

Liz looked back and counted the bodies, all those lives she had ruined simply by existing. So she chose to stop existing.

If she loved them, if she loved anything, it was because it burned.

Inertia, force, mass, gravity, velocity, acceleration. . .cause and effect.

Liz Emerson doesn't understand any of it.

But I do.

I understand how we fall. Where we fall. Why we fall.

I understand her sadness and loneliness and silence, her shattered heart.

It doesn't have to be this way, does it?

It wasn't always this way, was it?

Stay alive, Liz Emerson, stay alive.

She was insane, and this was Janie. This was the Janie who loved fire and carried rocks. This was the Janie Vivian who trusted rarely but deeply, and hoped with everything she was. This was the Janie Vivian, who I had loved with every atom in every cell in my body before memory was relevant.

We are nervous laughter and fast breath and faster heartbeats, alive alive alive.

We fall asleep to fairy tales, and the world rotates and revolves and time passes and we grow up and we understand that they are false. There are not heroes and princesses and villains. It's not that easy.

He leans back in his chair and just looks at it all, the final diary of a dying girl.

She finally figure out that she, Liz Emerson, was the equal and opposite reaction. She was the consequence.

subsequently sentenced to five minutes on the Wall.

And suddenly it's very clear to her that every action is an interaction, and everything she has ever done has led to something else, and to another something else, and all of that is ending here, at the bottom of the hill by Highway 34, and she is dying.

Forgetting is the easy part. This should be unsurprising, but it surprises me. Forgetting was easy. Remembering is endless and it hurts, endlessly.

There are no wicked queens or vengeful sorcerers, but that doesn't mean that there aren't bad people. There are. There are some truly, truly shitty people out there.

Had the world always been like this? Why had it seemed so much kinder when she was younger? Why had it seemed beautiful?

They never talked about it, but they both knew what they feared. More than anything, they feared they wouldn't have each other someday.

She wished to be happy, and fell asleep with an entire sky above her.

She wanted to go back. She wanted to be a little girl again, the one who thought getting high meant being pushed on the swing and pain was falling off her bike.

I like water, though. I like the way it waits, and when you touch it, it both moves away and clings to your finger. I like the way it rises, like memory, or fear.

I could understand a world where she was in Nepal, though I couldn't figure out why she didn't text me back. I could understand a world where she was distant but not lost. I couldn't understand a world without her.

She wasn't here to make memories. She was here for the flashing lights and the sweat and the smoke and the feel of someone else's skin against hers.

Micah lives like an apology. He blushes when he breathes because he's taking someone else's air. It's like all Micah wants is to disappear, and he thinks if he's quiet enough, if he keeps his eyes on the ground and barely breathes and treads lightly, people will forget he exists.

It was the colors that had initially attracted her, the vibrant blue of the Bunsen flame and the dusty red of copper and the deep violet of permanganate. It was the logic of balanced equations, the certainty that when element A mixed with element B, compound C would appear. It was like predicting the future; it was like magic. Most of all, it was being: of having to be so careful with the hydrochloric acid, of accidentally burning herself while lighting a match, of discovering.

In that moment, Liz Emerson felt that she was forever looking up at people who were much, much better than she could ever be, and the only thing she was really good at was pulling them down to her level.

it's never too late to change. Every day is a blank page, and your story has yet to be written.

We wonder what lies beyond.
One day, she will grow up and imagine death as an angel that will lend her wings, so she can find out.
Death, unfortunately, is not in the business of lending wings.

The world is so big and beautiful and infinite that we don't need to pretend

Liz Emerson held so much darkness within her that closing her eyes didn't make much a difference at all.

We knew each other to our fingertips. No, that's not right. We only knew each other in our fingertips, and that was nothing at all, and for a while that was okay. We could have been a love story, a fairy tale, an indie film about high school and selective insanity featuring a boy of angel parts and a girl made of dreaming. We could have been all the best things: bracelets sliding down arms while shots slid down throats, laughter and crashing music in dark and flashing rooms, kisses that started hesitant but didn't stay that way.

She was tired. Gravity pulled at her more aggressively than usual. When she closed her eyes, she could feel it, dragging her deeper, deeper. I would have pulled her back. I would have saved her from falling, but she didn't see my hand.

She had been desperate to feel something, anything. She needed a window, because she had broken her heart throwing it at locked doors.

On the first day of fifth grade, Liz was sitting on the swing beside Liam's at recess. Falling and flying, her hair fanned out behind her and her eyes were closed, and that was what had caught his attention, her closed eyes. She looked a little bit silly and very much alive, and Liam couldn't stop watching.

Liz, on her part, was aware that the boy beside her was watching, but she loved swinging too much to care what he thought. She loved the wind hitting her face and the brief moment of suspension at the top of the arc and the falling sensation that was magnified by the darkness of her eyelids. She imagined that she was a bird, an angel, a wayward star.

At the height of the arc, she let go. And she flew.

Liam watched with his mouth hanging wide open, expecting her to crumple on the asphalt and die tragically before his eyes.

She didn't, and when she walked away, Liam's heart followed.

Miracles do not belong to fairy tales. Miracles belong to the desperate, because only the desperate believe in bullshit.

I used to think that destiny was fluid, because isn't that the point of every Disney movie and Saturday-morning cartoon? You make your own choices. You decide how life goes. I always thought that your fate line would change if something happened, bam, something goes wrong and the line on your palm goes all wonky to reflect that. Nope. It still looks fine.

No one sees how her hands shake as she closes the magazine, lays it down gingerly as though afraid that her trembling will start an earth quake, and make the entire world crumble.

We race the world, and as fast as it rotates, as fast at it revolves, we are faster.

I remember and then I don't.
I forget and then it all comes rushing back.

Gravity is our playmate, momentum is our friend. We are blurs of motion. We are racing, and we are both winning, because we do not race each other. We race the world, and as fast as it rotates, as fast as it revolves, we are faster.

No one's going to be at our hundred-year reunion. Hell, no one's coming back for the five-year reunion." That was probably true.

He is very much in love with Liz Emerson,and it seems that she will never know.

Life is messy and the universe has an awful lot of people to keep track of. Sometimes things get screwed up. Sometimes bad things happen to good people. Sometimes good things happen to bad people.
That isn't fair.
Bad things should happen to bad people.
And they will. They will.

I put my hand in my pocket and squeeze my rocks and wonder if there is a word for the marks you get on your palm when you squeeze something so hard that the skin is on the verge of ripping.

He found that there were still beautiful things in the world, and nothing could ever change that.

There had been silent tears and ones that barely leaked out. There were tears that heaved from her in great sobs. They all slipped through my fingers when I tried to catch them, and they fell around her in oceans.

I watched her carve her mistakes in stone, and they arranged themselves around her. They became a maze with walls that reached the sky. Because she learned from so few of them, she was lost. Because she didn't have faith in anything, she didn't try to find a way out. I watched her try to face her fears alone, too proud to ask for help, too stubborn to admit she was afraid, too small to fight them, too tired to fly away.

Some things are easier to forget than other things, I'm noticing.

I'm sitting here and I can still feel distance between us, just folded and crumpled and tangled. Our soul has stretch marks.

You have to understand yourself before you can understand anything else.

Drowned out by the sound of his heart throwing itself against his ribcage.

There was a certain freedom in being on the outside. He watched instead of being watched.

They were catalysts, the fingers that tipped the first domino. They started things that grew into nothing things that were much greater than themselves. A touch, a nudge in the wrong direction, and everyone fell down.

Newton's laws of physics can rarely be applied to the real world. There is more to life than cause and effect. Things just aren't that simple

And tonight - tonight, that was what she wished for. She wished to be happy, and fell asleep with an extra sky watching over her.

She cannot bear to catch fireflies in jars. She hates zoos. She will not let her father teach her about constellations, because she will not trap the stars. She lives in a world made entirely of sky. It is inconceivable that one day, her world will grow so dark and distant that when she raises her head, she will not be able to find it.

Please," he whispers. "remember the sky.

I wish second chances were real.

I don't need to keep my misanthropy in check. It runs wild.

Some people die because the world does not deserve them. Liz Emerson on the other hand, did not deserve the world.

I am thinking about the way we love each other. I am thinking about our soul, one atom and bruised all over now that I have dragged it behind me with my muddy hands.

Liz was afraid of silence, and she kept her fears clenched so tightly in her fists that they grew and grew and swallowed her whole.

How many times can a person explode?

Whatever you do, whatever you redo, it all ends up here. Some things are just unavoidable. No matter how hard you try, the things meant to go to shit still go to shit. Terrible things happen, Micah, and you can't stop them. You just can't."

So you just do more terrible things.

When I crash, I will be inertia mass acceleration force gravity opposite equal everything. I will be nothing.

Like I said, the world isn't always fair, and sometimes we have to help it along.

She would be an object in motion that would stay in motion, even if it meant flattening everything in her path.

Sometimes they got lost. Sometimes they didn't want to be found. But it was a big forest and a bigger world, and whenever they went anywhere without each other, they left trails of stones that led all the way back to each other.

Because they loved each other with the biggest love of all.

Her mother's words echoed through her head: love you. People threw them around so easily, as if they were nothing, as if they meant nothing.

She would die, and maybe everyone would forget that she had ever lived.

Elizabeth Michelle Emerson," she whispers, stroking Liz's hair away from her face. She remembers being just two floors above here, holding Liz when she was still just a small bundle of pink in her arms. She remembers shifting Liz from one arm to the other so that she and her husband could sign the birth certificate beneath the name that they had chosen so carefully. Through her tears, she says softly, "Please don't make me write it on a tombstone,

That's what high school's for. You make plans and you don't follow through. You dream and you can be brave when you're dreaming, brave enough to imagine that there's actually a yourself to find, brave enough to finish projects even though you were never born with endings, brave enough to plan volunteer trips even though you'd probably be dead of asphyxiation by the time you're there because you're always holding your breath as if that can keep you together.

Well, hello, darling with the ocean eyes,
How many secrets keep us apart?
A sea of poems, a field of sighs,
Can I cross and return to the start?

He embraced his weirdness, and it was nice.

It was quiet, deeply so, but it was the kind of quiet that lived and moved and changed, filled to the brim with crickets and wings and the sounds of late summer.