Sarah Ockler Quotes

Ladies and gentlemen, Princess Pink has officially brung it.

When someone you love dies, people ask you how you're doing, but they don't really want to know. They seek affirmation that you're okay, that you appreciate their concern, that life goes on and so can they. Secretly they wonder when the statute of limitations on asking expires (its three months, by the way. Written or unwritten, that's about all the time it takes for people to forget the one thing that you never will).

How can you say it was all a lie?" I ask, just above a whisper. "Matt was my best friend. I loved him that way always. 'We have to look out for her.' That was the last thing he said to me alone. And then he died. What was I supposed to do, Frank? Tell me?

Anyway, what about you? How's, um, Abby? Angie? What's her name?
Oh, Hudson. Your suavity is an example to us all.

It got him killed, but at least he felt something.

She's a human being, just like me. Frail and faulty and flawed, capable of making the most heinous mistakes and inflicting the most severe pain. But equally capable of the greatest love.

Ink and paper were the only place where my voice didn't falter, didn't betray the real me.

But once in a while, you pick the right thing, the exact best thing. Every day, the moment you open your eyes and pull off your blankets, that's what you hope for. The sunshine on your face,warm enough to make you heart sing.

After half an hour of forced family fun, in which I score fifty points and take out at least seventy-five percent of my anger trying to blast Frankie with the ball, our game is cut short. Princess gets stung on the top of her foot by a teeny-tiny newborn baby of a jelly-fish and carries on like some shark just swam away with her torso. For one brief moment I wonder if it's the ghost of my journal, reincarnated after its watery death to claim vengeance by stabbing her with its thin metal spiral. The thought makes me smile on the inside, just a little bit.

If I'd known he was going to die, my last words to him would have meant something. They certainly wouldn't have been my out-of-tune attempt at singing that old Grateful Dead song he loved so much. No, I would have told him how I felt about him, straight out. No more flirting, wild-eyed whispers in the grass outside. I would have looked at him harder to ensure his image was permanently seared in my mind. I'd have asked him a million more things so I could remember what mattered before I got in the car on the way home from Custard's. Because after, nothing mattered.

Despite my ability to read people, I felt like an outsider, like someone watching a party from the other side of the glass. I could see these things unfold, but I couldn't quite understand the dynamics, the deep knowing that comes from growing up with people you care about.

All the people who'd brought me here, past and present, ancient and young, legend and life and lore, I channeled. I welcomed them into my infinite heart, alongside the ghosts, the shadows, the ache I'd always carry. I made their strength mine, a part of me. My inspiration. My voice.

Same people. Same hellos and goodbyes. Same beginnings and endings. Same befores and afters.

If you could, would you ask
For moonbeams in a heart of glass?
For sun rays on the silver sea?
Or would you ask for me?

Anna," he said, dragging his frosted fingers through my hair."Don't you know what it means when a boy pulls your hair at your birthday party?" "No." Just, then, i didn't know what anything meant.

Not only does he reduce my best friend's emotional state to something akin to an annoying rash, he also plants a new seed in my already overcrowded brain

Would 'sorry' have made any difference? Does it ever? It's just a word. One word against a thousand actions.

Left turn in four. Hundred. Feet.
An invisible electronic woman navigates us toward the highway from the distant planet Monotone, where everyone is tranquil and directionally adept,

Anger was sharp edged and clear. Grief was messy, blurry.
But in the end both left you hollowed out inside.

Sometimes you gotta just take things for what they are and appreciate them, not try to label it or explain it. Explanations take the mystery out of it, you know?

There was no going back to the way things were, because all you ever got was the way things are.

I'd send them both letters wishing them safe travels. Maybe they'd send me a postcard. Maybe they'd call when they got back, or when they settled in at college. Maybe they wouldn't, and they'd end up in the book. It was uncertain, like life.
I was starting to be okay with that.

For a girl who's been burned before, risking it all is easier said than done.

Nature: it's own creation, it's own mystery, existing long before we took our first breaths and long after we take our last.

Every story is part of a whole, entire life, you know? Happy and sad and tragic and whatever, but an entire life. And books let you know them.

I pick up my journal, mug, and granola bar wrapper, look up to the sky, and curse the God of Summer Vacations for getting me into this whole albatross-ditching, Sam-avoiding, aiding-and-abetting mess in the first place.

I like him, okay?"
"No you don't. You 'well I'm un I don't know um I guess yeah maybe' him.

"No you" title="Sarah Ockler Quotes: I like him, okay?"
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Mat - Red and Jayne's Matt, Frankie's Matt, my Matt - died of a broken heart.

What do you need, Josh? Just name it. Anything. I'm totally here for you.

I knew I could count on you, Hudson. The thing is... I don't know if I'm a good kisser. It's not the sort of thing you can figure out on your own, you know? So I was thinking, if it wouldn't be too much trouble, maybe you could kiss me, everyday for a year, and then you can...

"Hudson?

The girl who'd written volumes on the walls but never said a word.

Tonight, when Frankie sits at the table and innocently knocks over her glass of Diet Coke, Aunt Jayne starts to cry, and the translucent veil of general okayness evaporates to reveal the honest, ugly parts underneath.

How can I fault her for trying to bury a truth that when exposed to air and sunlight could only hurt the ones she loves?

It seemed everything that had ever lived and died in this world had passed through here, had left its indelible imprint.

Somewhere along the seashore, a strange wind blows over the ocean, and twenty oblivious boys simultaneously look up from their surfboards.

It's rally bad when dads cry.

Matt died of a broken heart

We have the ability to pass our memories on. We just have to tell them to someone.

He was always worrying about me – even when we were kids. If I scraped my knee or fell off my bike, he was the first one to help me up and make sure Mom got a Band-Aid."
"I remember." I smile. "He was the quintessential big brother."
"He was. But that's just it – he's not here to protect me anymore, Anna. And you don't have to be, either. I know I let stuff get crazy. I didn't mean to be like that – it just kind of happened. You couldn't have changed that. I – it was something I had to go through myself."
My throat tightens. "I felt like I let him down," I say. "All that stuff with smoking and Johan and Jake – I didn't take care of you. I couldn't even keep that one simple promise."
"Anna, my brother died. There's no way you could protect me from that. It's up to me, now. I let him down. I let me down.

I felt the stupidity rising in my throat and bit down harder, staring at his collarbone and the small piece of blue sea glass he wore on a leather cord around his neck, rising and falling.
Rising.
Falling.
Seconds? Hours? I didn't know. He'd made the necklace the year before from a triangular piece of glass he'd found during their family vacation to Zanzibar Bay, right behind the California beach house they rented for three weeks every summer. According to Matt, red glass was the rarest, followed by purple, then dark blue. To date he'd found only one red piece, which he'd made into a bracelet for Frankie a few months earlier. She never took it off.
I loved all the colors – dark greens, baby blues, aquas, and whites. Frankie and Matt brought them back for me in mason jars every summer. They lived silently on my bookshelf, like frozen pieces of the ocean I had never seen.
"Come here," he whispered, his hand still stuck in my wild curls, blond hair winding around his fingers.
"I still can't believe you made that," I said, not for the first time. "It's so – cool."
Matt looked down at the glass, his hair falling in front of his eyes.
"Maybe I'll give it to you," he said. "If you're lucky.

Emily, Megan, Jack, Luna, Patrick ... they helped me learn what true friendship is. It's never perfect, but it is important.

But death isn't an ending, Elyse. Just part of a longer journey. Death begets life, remember. One does not exist without the other.

Right after Matt died, I was afraid to do basically everything. I couldn't even bite my nails or sniff my shirt to see if I needed deodorant without feeling like he was watching me. I willed and prayed and begged him to give me a sign that he was watching, that he was with me, so I would know.
But he never did. Time moved on. And I stopped being afraid. Until right now, vulnerable and insecure and a little bit drunk. Lying in the sand and falling in crazy love with someone I just met. Matt is watching me. Observing. Possibly judging. And the worst part of it is, I don't want to wake up under his landslide of sad rocks anymore. I don't want to taste the marzipan frosting and the clove cigarettes. I don't want to think about the blue glass necklace or the books he read to me on his bed or the piles of college stuff or some random boy in the grocery store wearing his donated clothes.
I don't want to be the dead boy's best-friend-turned-something-else.
Or the really supportive neighbor friend.
Or the lifelong keeper of broken-hearted secrets.

No matter where on the globe you went, something was always changing.

When it's like this, I don't notice the cold. I don't hear the wind howling through the empty spaces. I don't feel like a small, broken-winged bird trapped in a rusty cage.

Abby's my sister, Hudson. We're twins."
"Oh thank God! I mean thank God ... that you ... have a sister ... what a special ... um, napkin?

We arrived in Vermont expecting to fix up the old lake house. But in the end, it was the house that fixed us.

She makes her people work on Sundays?" Rachel whispers, pulling some of my grandmother's old food from he fridge and sniffing it.

"Nah-weekends are optional. They only have to work them if they want to keep their jobs.

It was as though my heart made room for two truths that night - one real, the other safe and familiar and desirable.

Why did he leave so fast at the end? Who was on the phone? A girl? That's it, he must have a girlfriend. One from another school. One he was just about to call so he could propose to her, but I interrupted, and then he had to run off to take her call, because weddings don't just plan themselves, you know.

How easily some things can be broken for good and for bad, and how some things, no matter how shattered, can still go back together. Like Moo, my family may never be as strong as it once was. There are chips and cracks and scars, But some of them can be repaired, piece by piece, rebuilt into something even more cherished and loved and unique.

And I don't want to talk about it, because one day his name will brush against my lips in her presence, and through and involuntary blushing of the cheeks, a misting of the eyes, a breath drawn too tightly, or a single tear, the secret I'm supposed to keep locked up forever will be revealed

There's more, Anna. When we first got to California," she says, "you asked me if I remembered your birthday party." I nod, picking at a thread on her comforter. "I did remember. Matt was acting like such a space cadet that night after we got home – like he was floating. I can't believe I didn't figure it out, but of all the things that he could have been thinking about, you were the last – I mean, my mind just didn't even go there. You were like our sister."
"But I–"
"Wait – let me get this out." She looks at me hard, her broken wing eyebrow trembling to keep the tears back. "After I brushed my teeth, I walked into his room. He was sitting on his bed, playing with that blue glass necklace he always wore, a big smile on his face. Remember the necklace?"
The necklace.
"Of course."
"I asked him what was so funny. He jumped a little, not knowing I'd been watching him smile there like a goofy little kid. He said it was nothing – just that he had fun at the party. And I believed him, all the way up until the day I read your journal. That's when it all made sense. All the times he'd ask me about who you liked at school, or who wanted to take you to whatever dance."
She's quiet as I digest her story, putting the pieces together to form a complete whole from the missing half that's haunted me since that night – how did he really feel about me? Was it just one stupid moment, perpetuated a little too long, only to be forgotten as quickly as it came? A

Are we all on the same page, Delilah?
The same page? I don't even think we're even in the same library, but no need to bring that up.

Right here, right now, for the first time since I'd lost my voice, I let it all go.

He turned the entire living room into an airport, complete with a four-foot-high LEGO traffic control tower and a fleet of paper planes, plastic army pilots taped safely into their cockpits. From deep beneath the couch, a large utility flashlight illuminates some sort of...landing strip? I crouch down for a better look.
Oh. My. God.
Stuck to the carpet in parallel, unbroken paths from one wall to the other are two lanes of brand-new maxi pads. Plastic dinosaurs stand guard at every fourth pad–triceratops and T rexes on one side, brontosauruses and pterodactyls on the other–protecting the airport from enemy aircraft and/or heavy flow.

I thought of Atargatis, the First, frightening and beautiful. The mermaid goddess who lived on in the soul of every woman who'd ever fallen in love with the ocean.

I thought of Sebastian, my little mermaid queen, how happy he was the day of the parade, just getting the chance to express himself, to be himself.

I thought of Vanessa, the story about how she and her girlfriends became feminist killjoys to get a women's literature core in their school, the way she'd accepted me this summer without question, gently pushed me out of my self-imposed shell. Of her mother, Mrs. James, how she'd grabbed that bullhorn at the parade and paved the way for Sebastian's joy.

I thought of Lemon, so wise, so comfortable in her own skin, full of enough love to raise a daughter as a single mom and still have room for me, for her friends, for everyone whose lives she touched with her art.

I thought of Kirby, her fierce loyalty, her patience and grace, her energy, what a good friend and sister she'd become, even when I'd tried to shut her out. I thought of all the new things I wanted to share with her now, all the things I hoped she'd share with me.

I thought of my mother, a woman I'd never known, but one whose ultimate sacrifice gave me life.

I thought of Granna, stepping in to raise her six granddaughters when my mom died, never once making us feel like a burden or a curse. She'd managed the cocoa estate with her son, personally s

The only thing that's ours to accept is the fact that we don't always get to know the answers.

If I closed my eyes as you were talking, it was like I was there, like your stories were my stories. In many ways, I feel as if I have memories of you there, too.

It's strange," I say, rubbing my feet against his. "I feel like I should be sad, but I'm not. It's not that I won't miss you, but it just feels like-"
"Like everything is going to be okay anyway," he says, finishing my thought.

Hey. We good?" Christian asked.

They were all watching me, even the creepy doll head.

So I closed my eyes and said what I said best.

Nothing.

Being with Josh is like being touched from the inside out. An unexpected blaze of sunshine on an otherwise bleak winter day. Wrapping your fingers around a mug of hot chocolate after walking home in that frigid lake-effect wind. A fire crackling softly beneath your outstretched hands. The perfect combination of cupcake and icing, the kind where you can't quite identify all the secret ingredients, but you feel them melting together on your tongue, and you know that for as long you live, this will be the best thing you've ever tasted.

And there,
in the place where possibility lived,
I shone.

Explanations take the mystery out of things, right?

The late-night backyard encounter and kiss induced insomnia.

For all its ridiculous imperfections, life is pretty damn perfect sometimes.

You ask me why I'm nice to you," he said. "Why, why, why. But you don't ask me stuff that matters. Who I am or where I been. What I see when I look at you. What I want.

But I knew he wouldn't kiss me. Not tonight. Not like this. There was too much between us now, all the words and near misses. All the potential, the alternate futures that would stretch out before us in an unending spiral, all built on what happened in this moment. I held his fiery gaze and remembered the five-oh, the half-and-half, the promises I'd whispered to myself in the dawn light.
I might lose all my memories one day, but that wouldn't keep me from making them.

Because maybe Watonka was only ever supposed to be a temporary stopover, and maybe I will chase that train over the hill, and maybe we're all destined to leave this place, for sure, for real, together or alone. But for right now, we're here.

Virgin, right? the voice asks again. It comes from the tall one with white-blond hair falling into his eyes. Frankie is still giggling, and my entire body goes hot and red, despite the chill in the water. If Frankie thinks she's just going to auction me off, well ... I don't know. It's kind of hard to be witty when you're trying to call forth a giant sea squid to swallow you up and drag you down to the depths of the ocean floor, never to be seen, heard from, or mocked again.

The frosting shirt from your cake fight weeks earlier – just like the one you have in your closet. It was hanging inside his closet door, blue and crusty. It's probably still in there."
I smile, picturing Matt hanging his frosted shirt behind the door that night at the same time I was stuffing mine into its plastic bag in my room next door, totally freaked out about what had just happened.
"I didn't think you recognized it," I say. "That day we went through my closet before the trip. You wanted me to throw it out."
"I didn't recognize it that day. But once I saw the picture in your journal, it started to come together.

You know, hon, after Stephie died, we never really talked about her." she says, her hands tight around the cart handle. "There's a lot of pain there. Still. I guess we feel like we failed her. Like maybe if we were home instead of away at college, we could've done something to fix her. Something my patents and the doctors and her boyfriend missed. Sometimes I think I don't have the right to talk about her. Like at the end, I don't know her well enough to say anything. So much of her life became secret. She spent all of her time with her boyfriend, and when she was home, her nose was buried in her diary. I swear that diary was her best friend, even more than Megan."
"Did you ever read it?" I ask.
"No."
"Not even after she died?"
Aunt Rachel shakes her head, removing an eggplant from the middle row and pressing her fingers against its flesh. "To this day, I don't know if I would've, either. We never found it, Delilah. It's like she just ... took it with her.

Because I realized I was falling for another guy, fifty-six.

Sometimes I wonder if my whole life will pass by this way: me waiting in the shadows, waiting for something to happen. Waiting for someone else to make it happen. Something new or different or crazy and amazing. I've been there for so long, letting everyone else figure it out for me, floating along without much direction or conscious thought. Reacting.

No matter how long you waited, no matter how hard you wished, no matter how much you missed the past, time marched forward.

So Old Man Date Rape was number what?" she asks. "Four or five?"
"We're not counting him," I say. "This is the Twenty Boy Summer, not the Twenty Dirty Old Man Summer.

They don't want to know that you'll never eat birthday cake because you don't want to erase the magical taste of frosting on his lips. That you wake up ever day wondering why you got to live and he didn't.

I tried desperately to grab on to the moment, to the feeling, to hold it in my heart. But beauty is by its very nature elusive, slippery. A fragment, a flash. Here and gone again.

It was one thing to have your own kind of hope, an ember you could nurture inside, something to inspire you when things got dark. If it died, it was on you; no one else even had to know about it, and you were free to reignite it, or to give up and walk away. But when you were carrying it with another person, for another person, it was a dangerous dream. Treacherous as the sea, yet fragile as a bubble.

I grabbed my tackle box and bole and caught up with Pancake to go scare away some fish. He was really good at it- stuck his snout in the water like he could sniff them out, and then he'd come up sneezing and shaking like, Blasted! Dog's can't breathe underwater- how could I forget? We don't have gills and we can't ... Hey, what's this? Water? Oh boy oh boy I wonder if I can sniff out fish?

He read with intensity and was passionately in love with every character, every turn of plot or twist of language. He made the characters come alive for us, like he wasn't reading a work of fiction but telling stories about his own friends.

He's a dumb ass," Emilio said to me. "I'm almost finished."
The second he was out of earshot, Marcus sauntered back up to the bench with stiff, rehearsed swag. Definitely a mirror practicer, that one.
"Why you messin' with Emilio? What's up with you and me?" He wiped his hand on his black tank top and held it out, presumably for me to take, at which point we'd presumably climb aboard his moped and ride off into the sunset. Before I could shatter his dreams, Samuel smacked his hand away.
"Keep it movin'," Samuel said. He nudged him back toward the bikes, but the guy was unfazed.
"She likes me."
"She thinks you stupid," Samuel said. "And she right." Marcus cocked an eyebrow and licked his lips, more dazzling mirror work, and leaned in for another proposition. "When you're ready to graduate from a boy to a man, you call me."
"How about I call when you're ready to graduate from a boy to a man?"
The other guys howled, and just when I decided this game might be kind of fun, Emilio was at the bench, tugging a shirt over his head. "Vamos, princesa.

Stephanie was ... intense. That's the best word to describe her, Del. The best one.

My eyes were closed and his mouth tasted like marzipan flowers and clove cigarettes, and in ten seconds the whole of my life was wrapped up in that one kiss, that one wish, that one secret that would forever divide my life into two parts.

We only had this one life. We could wish for the past all day long. We could look at old pictures and tell ourselves the same old stories but they're just that - stories. Memories. They happened. And maybe they were wonderful and amazing, and maybe they changed our lives in ways we'd never be changed again, but they no longer existed. By the time we stopped to reflect on one moment, it was gone, and another was instantly upon us, also destined to pass.

I told him that I would love him with everything I had in me until the very end of everything, and I meant it.

They key to a great party is the music," Sam says, scrolling through his iPod as we tramp through the sand. Eddie - the guy having the party - put Sam in charge of the playlist. "If it's too intense, no one will be able to hang out and talk. But if it's too mellow, it will turn into a snoozefest. You also have to consider timing. There's a particular kind of music appropriate for each stage of the party - intro, warm-up, full swing, wind-down, and outro.

Like the beach glass you guys always brought me. Sometimes I dump it out on my desk and press my ear to the pieces, trying to hear the ocean. Trying to hear you.

If I let him walk away now, we'll forever be a "just"; Just hockey player and skating coach. Just music swappers. Just friends. A not-quite-almost whose time passed through as quickly as the train, fading into the distance before it even had a real chance at staying, at becoming something more, because I didn't speak up.

I understand how easy it would be to lose yourself in the heart of another. It's frightening. Exhilarating. An ocean with no lifeguard.

Heartless, someone called me the other day. A heartless bitch.
But that's where I get stuck.
If I'm so heartless, what's this bruised thing in my chest, full of fire and hope, banging so loud I can't sleep, can't think? What is it that aches when he kisses me, aches when I walk away?

Emilio and his brothers had been a topic of more Jude-and-Zoe middle school gabfests than the Cullens, the Lightwoods, or any of the other mysterious yet fictional bad boys we dreamed about back then, and she'd freak if she knew he'd resurfaced.

Whenever we could steal a few minutes alone, that's when we became the "other", the charged-up thing that kept me up at night, afraid of falling so fast, afraid of losing, afraid it wouldn't last once everyone found out. We stole too-short kisses in the front hallway, shared knowing and devious looks across the table when we weren't being watched. We snuck out every night behind the house to watch for shooting stars and whisper about life, our favorite books, about the meaning of songs. It wasn't the topics themselves that changed, we had talked about all of those things befores. But now, there was a new intensity, an urgency to know as much as we could, to fit as much as possible into our final nights, before somebody found out.

I'm not in love with him. I'm in love with the way he erases things.

Not so long ago I'd been convinced that losing my voice was the worst thing that could ever happen to me, the worst tragedy. But since then I'd been losing my whole self, everything I stood for, believed in, felt. Everything I ever wanted to be. Everything I ever was.

Not everyone who comes to Luna's on gig nights is here to see me. Some people are actually more interested in the coffee. Or the scones. Or in hitting on Emily."
"Oh, I didn't say I wasn't' here to hit on Em," I say. "Just that hitting on Em and enjoying your music aren't mutually exclusive.

Beneath the vast diamond sky, I felt both all important and utterly significant, the goddess and the damned in equal measure.

Plan B
plan Battered and Broken
plan Boxed in
plan Bailed on and Back from the dead
plan Better luck next time
plan Balled up
plan Backtracked
plan Backhanded
plan Backward steps
plan Blackballed, Black-marked, and Blacklisted
plan B-side, Bye Bye Baby
plan Belly up and Beat down
plan Bad days ahead and Best are far Behind

I was, but then I realized that I was holding on to something that didn't exist anymore. That the person I missed didn't exist anymore. People change. The things we like and dislike change. And we can wish they couldn't all day long but that never works.

What if he thinks I'm a tourist girl looking for some romantics long distance love affair just so she can share his gushing, beach-stained postcards with her friends?

But in the end, there were only two boys that really mattered.

Matt and Sam.