Michael Thomas Ford Quotes

Anyone can be crazy. That's usually just because there's something screwed up in your wiring, you know? But suicide is a whole different thing. I mean, how much do you have to hate yourself to want to just wipe yourself out?

No one ever tells you that when your heart breaks, you can feel it. But you can. It feels like something has crumbled inside you and the pieces are falling into your stomach. It hurts more than any punch ever could. You stop breathing, and for a while you can't remember how. When you finally do, it feels like your throat has closed up, like you're trying to suck air through a straw.

I've been thinking about that ever since. Am I lucky? Am I lucky that I didn't die? Am I lucky that, compared to the other kids here, my life doesn't seem so bad? Maybe I am, but I have to say, I don't feel lucky. For one thing, I'm stuck in this pit. And just because your life isn't as awful as someone else's, that doesn't mean it doesn't suck. You can't compare how you feel to the way other people feel. It just doesn't work. What might look like the perfect life - or even an okay life - to you might not be so okay for the person living it.

Given a choice between discussing the symbolism of a pig head on a stick and discussing my feelings, I'll take the pig head every time.

To be fair he is Lord Byron," Jane said. "I don't know many people who haven't slept with him at one time or another."
Jane Fairfax

I guess I've learned that no matter how bad things get, there are always people who love you.

Seven little crazy kids chopping up sticks;
One burnt her daddy up and then there were six.
Six little crazy kids playing with a hive;
One tattooed himself to death and then there were five.
Five little crazy kids on a cellar door;
One went all schizo and then there were four.
Four little crazy kids going out to sea;
One wouldn't say a word and then there were three.
Three little crazy kids walking to the zoo;
One jerked himself too much and then there were two.
Two little crazy kids sitting in the sun;
One a took a bunch of pills and then there was one.
One little crazy kid left all alone;
He went and slit his wrists, and then there were none.

One time Allie and I skipped school and went to see this foreign film called Los Diablos, where these villagers found a glowing blue ball and peeled pieces off of it to see what was inside. Only the ball was really radioactive, and they all died from the poison. I think that's what happens when you look too deep inside for the truth. The poison comes out, and you die, even though you have beautiful glowing pieces of blue truth in your fingers.

So now I'm thinking about it. I'm imagining sitting down with my parents and actually saying, "I'm gay." And you know what? It makes me a little mad. I mean, straight guys don't have to sit their parents down and tell them they like girls.

He said that I have to remember that even though I've changed a lot in here, I'm going back to a world that hasn't changed

I'm gay," I said, not sure how else to say it.
"You're fifteen," she said. "You can't be gay.

I didn't ask to be saved

The whiskey was a good start. I got the idea from Dylan Thomas. He's this poet who drank twenty-one straight whiskeys at the White Horse Tavern in New York and then died on the spot from alcohol poisoning. I've always wanted to hear the bartender's side of the story. What was it like watching this guy drink himself out of here? How did it feel handing him number twenty-one and watching his face crumple up before the fall of the stool? And did he already have number twenty-two poured, waiting for this big fat tip, and then have to drink it himself after whoever came took the body away?

That's what people do. Kill the things they're afraid of.

Then he asked me which one I thought was most likely to happen. I wish I knew. I really do. But I don't. You'd think that after living with these people for fifteen years I'd know a little something about them. But right now I feel like I don't know my parents at all. I guess
when you get down to it, I've never really thought about them as people. They've always been my parents. Now I have to think about them as people with feelings. What a pain.
The funny thing is, I bet they feel the same way.

When people hurt us, the best thing to do isn't to ask why they did it but to remind ourselves that it wasn't our fault.

I asked her, 'Did you like Sadie?'
Juliet put down the book she was reading. 'I liked her the way you like a hurt dog,' she said.
'What do you mean?' I asked her.
'You feel sorry for it, and you want to help it, but you're not sure it won't bite you when you're not looking,' Juliet said.

Why is it okay to put someone to death, but it's not okay for those people to do it themselves?

There's nothing more complicated – or fragile – than the relationship between parents and their children. It's like no other relationship there is. And no one tells you how to make it work. Either you find your way or you don't.

And just because your life isn't as awful as someone else's, that doesn't mean it doesn't suck. You can't compare how you feel to the way other people feel. It just doesn't work. What might look like the perfect life - or even an okay life - to you might not be so okay for the person living it. God,

Straight people get married so that they can have sex. Gay men have sex so that they can get friends.

Let me tell something, seeing your name and psychiatric ward on the same piece of paper isn't the best way to start your day.

Like I said, some people think it's weird that my best friend is a girl. Sometimes I think it's weird, too. Mostly people assume that we're boyfriend and girlfriend, which I guess we could be. But that just seems too teen-movie, if you know what I mean. A boy and girl are best friends, neither of them dates anyone else, and then one night they look at each other and - bang - they realize they've been in love with each other the whole time. Everyone's happy and they go to the big dance together.

And anyway, the truth isn't all that great. I mean, what's the truth? Planes falling out of the sky. Buses blowing up and ripping little kids into millions of pieces. Twelve-year-olds raping people and then shooting them in the head so they can't tell. I can't watch the news anymore or look at the papers. It's like whoever sits up there in Heaven has this big bag of really crappy stuff, and once or twice a day she or he reaches in and sprinkles a little bit of it over the world and makes everything crazy, like fairy dust that's past its expiration date.

I loved Jerry, and I wanted to have his baby." She laughed. "This was before women started looking at their vaginas in hand mirrors and Gloria Steinem told us we could be more than just mothers.

I believe that God - if he exists at all - is what we want him to be. The true God is unknowable, and so we dress him up in costumes that make him visible to us. Then we come up with a lot of very silly rules that we attribute to him and tell everyone if they don't follow those rules, they can't be part of the gang.

How come someone always saves the people who try to kill themselves and then makes them tell everyone how sorry they are for ruining their evening? I keep feeling like everyone wants me to apologize for something. but I'm not going to. I don't have anything to apologize for. They're the ones who screwed everything up. Not me.
I didn't ask to be saved.

Faith, he had learned that night in front of the flickering television, was most glorious when it was most untouched by reason.

Trust me no matter how horrible you feel or how bad things seem, there is always a way out. Suicide is never your only option.

I'm not even sure I want kids, by the way, even if I'm not the one who has to be pregnant. It seems too risky. I mean, what if you end up with a kid that's just plain bad? Or stupid? It's not like you can give it away or put it in a garage sale or something. You're pretty much stuck with it for a long time.
I know now they have all these tests they can do so you can find out if your kid has three arms or is retarded or whatever, but you can't test for everything. You can't test for crazy, for example, or for bad taste in music and clothes and stuff. You can't know if your kid is going to be someone you would actually want to have hanging around. You just have to take your chances. That seems like a pretty big gamble to me.

you either are or aren't

I thought you said you were okay with turning forty.

I know all about dreams that make you want to scream.

I keep feeling like everyone wants me to apologize for something.

When The Journal of Words compiled its list of the one hundred best novels written in English, do you know that Pride and Prejudice was number twelve?" She stopped pacing and glared at Jane. "And do you know where Jane Eyre was?" she asked. She looked at the four of them in turn, but nobody answered her. "Number fifty-two!" she shrieked. "Fifty-two! Below that pornographic travesty Lolita!" She spat the title as if it were poison. "Below Huckleberry Finn! Below Ulysses. Have you ever tried to read Ulysses? Have you ever finished it? No, you haven't. No one has. They just carry it around and lie about having read it.

Sometimes I think there's someone up there just sitting around thinking of ways to make me look like a complete moron. Seriously, I bet there's an angel - or, more likely, a demon - assigned just to me. And every day it gets up and asks itself what it can do to ruin my life. Well, today it got an A plus.

I have to keep her in line somehow or she'll think she's the boss of everything.

That's why teenage dating is so dumb, because it's doomed to fail. You'd think people would have learned that by now, but I guess they haven't. They go right on falling in love and thinking it's going to survive high school.

How do you really know if anyone loves you?

He's afraid they'll tell their kids to stay away from him and cross the street when they see him. "Don't talk to the crazy man, honey. He might bite you."
Coming from someone covered in tattoos, this seemed a little strange. I mean, you can see tattoos. You can't see crazy. If I was him, I'd be more worried about people thinking he was in a gang or something.

She laughed. "Welcome to Camp Meds," She said. "Where the campers are crazy and the counselors want you to take drugs.

I think I'm in love," he said after swallowing. "I could marry that pie."
"According to the anti-gay crowd, that'll be next," said Nan. "Pies and sheep.

Sometimes seeing the changes in one another had the opposite effect and actually comforted them. Seeing that they weren't alone in growing older, they stopped caring, or at least caring so much. But often this seemed to be accompanied by a kind of neutering, a gradual disappearance of anything remotely resembling sexuality, until finally the men in question were more like kindly old aunties than men who liked to fuck other men.

I swear, sometimes it feels like there's this monkey in my head who runs around turning the dials and changing channels on me. One minute I'm sitting around eating chocolate chip cookies and then all of a sudden I'm thinking about bears.

Once you realise there's nothing to be afraid of when you die, there's nothing else to worry about.

I'm still kind of a mess. But I think we all are. No one's got it all together. I don't think you ever do get it totally together. Probably if you did manage to do it you'd spontaneously combust. I think that's a law of nature. If you ever manage to become perfect, you have to die instantly before you ruin things for everyone else.

Who uses crunchy peanut butter?" he asked the room. "You might as well eat squirrel shit.

People still think what you look like is who you are.

No one in France cares if you tried to kill yourself. In fact, I think they like you better because you're all tragic.

If they had a pill that would fix every dysfunctional family in the world, don't you think they'd be selling it?"
"I don't think the world is ready for that kind of happiness.

Here's what I think. One, people should figure out that if they go around bothering bears, chances are they're going to end up bear snacks. Second, people suck.

Why is it that you have to warn people about who you are?

It's a plant." Burke's father stared at the laptop's screen, peering over his glasses at the photos as Burke brought them up.
"It's not just a plant, Ed," Lucy said, looking at Burke and shaking her head. "It's about the feeling of the image."
Burke's father snorted. "Well, it feels like a plant." He turned to his son. "I'm not saying it's not pretty. But it's a plant.

I mean, if I'm going to go to all the trouble of being gay and everything, I might as well tell people.

When did being single become a disease?

I'm tired of people thinking they're doing me favours.

Most religions are concerned about what happens when you die, about going somewhere better than here as a reward for faithful service or whatever you want to call it. Paganism teaches that being here is the reward, and that we need to make the most of it and leave the world a better place.

It will go away ... The stuff in your head. Little by little.

I'm not sure what a good person is, exactly. On the one hand, it could be someone who always play by the rules. But someone can follow the rules and still be a real jerk, you know? In fact, some of the biggest idiots I know are people who follow the rules, usually because they make you feel like crap when you don't.

Now I just have these reddish scars there. I guess I always will, although Goody says they'll fade over time. I don't know if I want them to fade. That probably sounds totally freaky, but part of me doesn't want to forget what it felt like, even though it hurt. If I forget about the pain, I might also forget that it was a really stupid idea to do it in the first place.