Jennifer Gooch Hummer Quotes

Love doesn't always mean rings and veils and walks down the aisle.
Sometimes love means broken windows and broken hearts,
and not being able to fix either.
And sometimes love means telling you,
there's no such thing as time in Heaven so don't rush to meet me.
Stay a while, and pick, girl, the roses.

Apron," Chad said, sounding a little nervous. "I've been wondering. Do you think you and me would have been friends, if, you know, we were in seventh grade together?"

I thought about it for a second. I thought about Rennie and Jenny Pratt making fun of Chad, his swishy way of walking down the halls, and Johnny Berman and Sherman Howl writing faggot on the top of his desk and picking him last for dodge ball. And I thought about how, if I ignored them all and decided to be friends with Chad anyway, he would have been my only one.

"Yes," I nodded. "We'd be friends."

"Yup," Chad said smiling as far as his cracked lips would let him. "That's what I think, too.

Without lifting her head, she said, "I want you to get out."

And right then I was sure: M had been born with the mean gene.
It's the way we come out, Toby said. Maybe M being mean wasn't any different than Mike and Chad being gay, or me having freckles. Mean was just the way she came out. She hated me all right, but it was nothing personal.

At the door, I looked back at all those people I didn't know and thought about how small your heart is but how big of a space it takes up. And how, even though you can't see it, that heart space grows so quietly across a room or up some stairs into someone else's living room, that even if you never step foot in it again, the air in there is changed forever.

Mary made him lie down in the middle of the stage. Then she started singing, "Everything's all right, yes, everything's fine …" and rubbing something on his forehead, which wasn't going to help him. No one ever gets saved by a forehead rub. Ask Laura Ingalls Wilder if you don't believe me. But Mary kept doing it anyway, begging him to let the world turn without him tonight because everything was all right - which it wasn't, because even his best friend, Judas, was acting weird.

And suddenly it smelled like someone forgot to turn on the gravity. The air was so fresh and light you could practically float on it. Flowers were everywhere, all of them bursting with color.

The lady shuffled around, bending over to inspect the flowers and holding up one of the tags. "Oh nuts. Are these already sold?" she asked. I shook my head. "No."

"Goody," she smiled, looking at a tag that said Adulescenita Deferbui, on the outside and The Fires of Youth have Cooled – But you're still looking foxy!

I missed Chad in the same way that I missed my mom now: always.

I waved to him, and he waved back. I tried not to think about how Chad couldn't see me doing that now. Helen Keller said that when you lose one sense, another one grows stronger. But by the time Chad learned how to hear me waving, it would be too late.

I stared at the phone and swallowed the piece of my heart that was lodged in my throat now.

Love. The opposite of fear is love, and every minute of every day, we choose between the two.

She wouldn't even hold her own baby." His voice cracked when he said that, and something shivered inside my heart. I used to think the saddest thing had happened to me, but now I knew it had happened to my sister instead.

I watched her shuffle around, reading tags and smelling flowers, laughing every time or smiling nice - what flowers were supposed to make you do.

I walked around the counter and straight into his white T-shirt. Then we stood like that, him holding my red head, and me listening to the part of his chest where his heart used to be.

Listen, little lady, the people who do this kind of thing think if we rub up against them, they'll catch it. But there ain't no catching what we got," he smirked. It was the same thing Mike had said. "Either you is or you isn't. And if you're lucky, you isn't." Toby's extra-brown eyes softened. "Life's hard enough."

He looked at me while I thought about this: Being gay wasn't any different than having freckles.

We turned away from each other at the same time, the space between us getting longer, until it looked like we hadn't even been standing together in the first place. But we had, and it was there: another heart layer on top of that sidewalk, changing it forever.

What Love Means to Me," Chad said, writing. "By Apron Bramhall, the loveliest noun I know. Get over here, noun.

I'm an oncologist, not a podiatrist." My skin unzipped. Those were the worst kinds of doctors. They never saved anyone.

And even though I had freckles and red hair and almost killed Grandma Bramhall, I danced like I didn't.

I wrote Vis consilii epers mole ruit sua on the front of the first tag, and on the inside I put the translation: Force lacking judgment collapses under its own weight. And in case they still didn't get it, I wrote Sorry! I'm just a big dummy.

Inside, the air smelled so fragile you could break it with a sneeze.

I stayed there sipping in that wrong air, until it filled my lungs with knowing that something bad was about to happen.

I didn't want them to be gay anymore. I didn't want people like Mrs. Perry to make a face and step away from them; I didn't want Mike to shuffle his feet and clear frogs out of his throat whenever he talked to my dad; and I didn't want Chad to go around making fun of himself so nobody else could. And most of all, I didn't want them to have AIDS.

I folded up that last bit of hope and put it away on the top shelf of my life.

I sat there looking normal but thinking about how much I wished we were going to see the real Jesus. Everyone needed a miracle once in a while.

I hadn't actually come out and asked him to pick us up, so when he said, "All right, give me twenty minutes, I gotta go dig out my old crutches," I knew with every last drop of blood and every bone in my body that Mike was at least related to Jesus.

The church smelled like leftover tears. Sadness was tucked into corners and hidden under beams and pasted so thick on the walls that it was hard to breathe.

I lifted my hand and pulled the blue paper cap back a little, until a piece of my red fell out, then I reached my hand back inside the case. I slid my finger under some tubes and into her tiny purple hand. And just like that, like she had known it was me all along, she squeezed it.