Shaun David Hutchinson Quotes

The nerd in me that needs to understand everything is dying to drive July to a lab and cut off pieces of her to look at under a microscope to see if I can figure out what's keeping her alive, and the poet in me wants to ask her a million questions about being dead so that I can understand how she sees the world and what the stars look like through eyes that once saw what's on the other side of life. But July doesn't need a nerd or a poet. She needs a friend, and I suppose that unenviable job has fallen to me.

Don't get so focused on where you're going that you forget the people you're travelling with. There's no point reaching a destination if you arrive alone.

The boxes that are supposed to help us understand one another ultimately wedge us further apart. Even worse is that we rage against the artificial divisions the boxes create, claim that we're more complex and complicated than how we're defined by others, and then turn around and stuff the next person we meet into one and tape the lid shut. And then, as if the indignity of life isn't enough, when a person dies, we cram what's left of them into one final box for eternity.

To him, I am the cheap pair of sunglasses you buy on vacation because you know you won't care if you break or lose them

I'd never ride a rocket into out space, so standing at the edge of the ocean was probably the closest I'd get to touching something boundless and greater than myself. For me, the ocean had a way of putting the rest of the world into context for a couple seconds.

I saw the world from the stars' point of view, and it looked unbearably lonely.

Maybe love doesn't require falling after all. Maybe it only requires that you choose to be in it. I wasn't sure what was going to happen with us or how much time we had left, but I wasn't going to waste a second of it.

It was chance. A random series of events given meaning by somone desperate to prove there's a design to our lives. That the minutes and hours between our birth and death are ore than frantic moments of chaos. Because if that's all they are - if there are no rules governing our lives - then our entire existence is a meaningless farce.

Hospital walls have no memory. They would crumble under the weight of so much suffering. It's better that they forget.

I realize that adults are just as fucked as the rest of us. No one really grows up. No one unravels all of life's many mysteries. They just grow older and become better liars.

I don't think I'm as strong as you think I am."
"And I think you're stronger than you believe.

What if I don't give a shit about the world?"
"I'd say that's pretty fucking sad."
"Why?"
"Because the world is so beautiful.

We're all Holden Caulfield at fifteen, but when we grow up we want to be Atticus Finch

People always talk about how great Deathday Letters are. About how they give people a chance to say goodbye. About how terrible the world would be without them.

Because sometimes it's easier to start over with a clean slate than to drag the baggage of your past with you wherever you go.

« You can choose to be happy with what life gives you," he said, "or spend your life miserable. I choose happiness. It's really that simple. »

How can you make an informed decision about whether to save the world if you never leave your tiny part of it?

You can't fight gravity. Gravity is love. Love requires us to fall.

Physicists have theorized that we live in an infinite and infinitely expanding universe, and that everything in it will eventually repeat.
There are infinite copies of your mom and your dad and your clothes-stealing little sister. There are infinite copies of you.
Despite what you've spent your entire life believing, you are not a special snowflake. Somewhere out there, another you is living your life. Chances are, they're living it better.

The funny thing is,' Calvin said, 'I thought I'd been breathing underwater this whole time, but I guess I've been drowning.

Knowing leads to caring.

The bookstore itself was cozy but not crowded, with posters of classic novels framed and hung on the walls. And it was filled with that wonderful book smell that anyone who's ever even been near a book will recognize. It's more than the smell of paper; it's the smell of the high seas and adventure and far off worlds. It's the smell of a billion billion worlds, each a portal to somewhere new.

It seems silly to worry about the arbitrary moment some person long dead declared to be the end of one year and the beginning of another, as if our attempts to divide time into meaningful chunks actually mean anything. People wait for the countdown to tell them it's okay to believe in themselves again. They end each year with failure, but hope that when the clock strikes twelve, they can begin the new year with a clean slate. They tell themselves that this is the year things will happen, never realizing that things are always happening; they're just happening without them.

But life's not really that easy."
Mrs. Ross laughed. "You're young, white, and male. Life doesn't get any easier.

Neatness is the trademark of a boring mind.

The past is a cold place. No one deserves to be trapped there, no matter how terrible you believe your sins to be.

She's the gristle stuck between Time's teeth, and I love her for it.

Grief is quiet. Grief is a strangled cry. Tears we hide. A scream in a vacuum where sound doesn't carry. And though we try to share it, grief is ultimately a burden each of us must carry alone.

Sometimes, Henry, remembering hurts too much.

The universe may forget us, but our light will brighten the darkness for eons after we've departed this world. The universe may forget us, but it can't forget us until we're gone, and we're still here, our futures still unwritten.

We can choose to sit on our asses and wait for the end, or we can live right now. We can march to the edge of the void and scream in defiance. Yell out for all to hear that we do matter. That we are still here, living our absurd, bullshit lives, and nothing can take that away from us. Not rogue comets, not black holes, not the heat death of the universe. We may not get to choose how we die, but we can choose how we live.

Everyone matters, Elena."
"But don't some people matter more than others?" I asked. "I mean, if we're talking about saving humanity, doesn't it make sense to save the best and brightest of us?"
Freddie's laughter had faded. "So you're saying it's better to save a world-famous physicist than say, a modest merchant who was a partner in a bed feathers company."
"That's a really odd comparison, but yeah."
"Except no," Freddie said. "That merchant and his wife would go on to birth and raise Albert Einstein." She paused dramatically. "Hermann and Pauline Einstein might not have seemed like anyone special at the time, but their son changed how we look at the universe."
"That's one example."
"Here's another. Who should you save? A genius mathematician admitted to Harvard at sixteen or a single mom living on welfare?"
"This is a trick question."
"Are you allergic to answering questions, or what?"
"The mathematician," I said.
"Ted Kaczynski. Otherwise known as the Unabomber. And that single mom would go on to write Harry Potter.

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I don't think I deserve him."

Audrey shrugged. "Probably not. But he doesn't deserve you, either. Maybe that's why you're perfect for each other."

"Do you think it could last?"

"Who cares?"

"I care."

Audrey sucked up her drink and tossed the empty cup onto the ground. There was no way we were going to be able to hide the fact that we'd had a party from Mom. Fuck it.

"You like bacon, right?" Audrey asked.

"Duh."

"So, when you're offered bacon for breakfast, do you refuse because you're worried about what's going to happen when it's gone?"

"No."

"No!" Audrey smacked me in the chest. "You eat that bacon and you love it because it's delicious. You don't fret over whether you'll ever have bacon again. You just eat the bacon." Audrey stood in front of me and held my face between her hands. Her expression was so solemn that it was difficult not to laugh. "Eat the bacon, Henry.

Wake up, go to school, go home. Repeat until the world ends.

Charlie was quiet until we pulled up to the front of CHS. He stopped me when I tried to hop out of the Jeep. "If you want people to treat you normal, you have to act normal." A few of the other students being dropped off cast stealthy glances in my direction. Space Boy was back for their amusement. "I never asked to be treated normal, Charlie. I just want to be left alone.

We're not words, Henry, we're people.
Words are how others define us, but we can define ourselves any way we choose.

Sometimes I feel like I'm floating alone in the ocean. Other times I feel like the ocean's in a paper cup.

It's easy to allow the world to collapse down to our own stories. To see ourselves as the central figure in the only story worth knowing and forget that every person we encounter is living their own, is the center of their own universe. But that's the nature of the human experience.

I asked my father once why falling in love in such a big deal, and he told me that one day in love is worth a hundred days not in love. Maybe it's true. I don't know. I hope it's true.

It begins when he's still a man in a suit, doing the kinds of boring things that men in suits do. The things that no one writes about because they know that boys don't really have nightmares about clowns or three-eyed tentacled beasts that rise from deep within volcanoes. When boys wake up screaming in the night, it's because they know that, one day, they'll have to grow into men who wear suits and spend their days doing boring things that cause them to rot from within, so their skin withers and blackens and cracks, leaking out their juices until they finally lie decaying and putrid, forgotten by a world that deemed them unworthy of remembering.

It begins there because it's important to know that a superhero with no past began as a man with no future.

...before we leave, she asks if we know where we're going. We tell her we don't. She says the only way to figure it out is to stop searching.

He didn't kill himself because of a single overwhelming problem; he died from a thousand tiny wounds.

Please. I want to get better; I want to be better."
"Then you're going to have to do it on your own.

I could write my name across the sky, and it would be in invisible ink.

...but that's life. One long tunnel. There are lights along the way. Sometimes they feel spread farther apart than others, but they're there. And when you find one, it's okay to stand under it for a while to catch your breath before marching back into the dark

Because you were a freak and I was a freak, and being two freaks together was better than being two freaks alone.

Up until that point everyone who gets hurt winds up fine. There's not actual loss. And then Voldemort kills Cedric Diggory and suddenly everything becomes real. We have to face the possibility that we won't all live long enough to lose our hair or become those crotchety old folks who yell at dumb kids like us. Good people die and bad people don't always get what they deserve. Death stops being this abstract concept that happens to other people, and becomes something that could happen to the people we love. Or even to us.

As human beings, we're born believing that we are the apex of creation, that we are invincible, that no problem exists that we cannot solve. But we inevitably die with all our beliefs broken.

Diego looked at me and saw me. No one had seen me since Jesse.

When someone says, "Everything happens for a reason," they're trying to convince you there's a pattern for your life, and that if you pay close attention, it's possible to decipher it.

Sometimes when a star collapses, it becomes a fiery supernova, but other times the core density is so great that it quietly consumes itself, forming a black hole, its gravitational pull so terrible that nothing can escape, not even light.

You can't see a black hole, but if you look closesly, you can witness its effect on those objects nearest to it - the way it changes the orbit of solar systems or draws off a star's light a little at a time, sucking it down to its dense center,

Maybe we couldn't have stopped Jesse's collapse, but we should have seen it happening.

No doesn't mean to Marcus what it means to those without money and a car.

The world burns from the inside out. You don't see it until it's too late.

A random series of events given meaning by someone desperate enough to prove there's a design to our lives.

Except he and I know that some pain burrows so deep, no narcotic can ever soothe it. It's etched on your bones. It hides in your marrow, like cancer. If the boy survives, the pain is a memory he won't want.

Making out with Marcus had always felt like a race to the finish line, but with Diego I felt like I'd already won.

We remember the past, live in the present, and write the future.

Chaos is an excuse for people who don't have the patience to see the patterns.

A couple of customers interrupted [...] who wanted to know if we had some YA book about ants and aliens I'd never heard of.

Now that I had something to lose all I could think about was holding onto the thing I'd found.

Having choices is the problem. Everything would be easier if someone told me what to do: push the button, stop seeing Marcus, get over Jesse. The problem with choices is that I usually make the wrong ones

You bite your lip when you're lying, Henry."
"And yours move when you're being a nosy fuckmuppet.

That's the problem with memories: you can visit them, but you can't live in them.

We make choices. We make bad choices. But we still deserve the right to choose.

I think people who believe high school was the greatest only remember their triumphs. [...] The real world is a disappointment to them because their past burned so brightly.

And you couldn't say 'vagina' without giggling. If you can't say it, you dont get to go near it

Dad might have helped you see the best parts of yourself, but they were always there, and no one can take them away."
(...)
"If that's true, how am I supposed to see them now that he's gone?"
"Get a mirror.

Death is as normal and digestion. People move through life the way food moves through our bodies. Their natural usefulness is extracted along the way to help enrich the world, and when they have nothing left to give, they're eliminated. Much like our bodies would clog up with excrement if we didn't defecate, the world would do the same if we didn't die.

He can't breathe because he's got asthma, whereas you're just an asshole for no reason.

Maybe hell is seeing the lost loved painted over the faces of the strangers we meet.

We aren't just defined by who we are, but by who are friends are. It's funny that we put so much importance on something that wont mean shit once we graduate.

I was diamond on the outside, and I would not break.
Inside, though, I was already broken.

Because there's no way that anyone would give up on a child in less time than it takes to microwave popcorn.

The tallest slugger touched my forehead, and I ignited like a sparkler on the Fourth of July. Shards of dazzling light rippled under my skin. I was the constellation Grus. The Trifid Nebula. I was the Big Bang, expanding endlessly through time and space forever.
"I thought I was dying. That I was going to expire on a cold slab, trapped inside an UFO, my body filled with every light that had ever existed. I couldn't imagine a better way to die.

Jesse believed stories were the collective memories of the world, recorded in books so that each of us could know who we were before we became who we are.

Age isn't stealing from my grandmother; it's slowly unwinding her.

I don't need you to believe me."
"I know. It's one of the things I like most about you.

Nobody wins playing fair.

What if you're wrong? What if I screw up and the world burns?"
Fadil shrugged. "Then I'll buy marshmallows and we'll watch it burn together.

Life is not fair. And if life's not fair, then what's the point? Why bother with the rules? Why bother with life at all? Maybe that's the conclusion that Jessie came to. Maybe he woke up one morning and decided he simply didn't want to play a game against people who refused to obey the rules.

Sitting beside me, holding my hand under the table.

What happens if the world ends?" Freddie said.
"Maybe it already has," I said, "and this is it. Now we have the opportunity to start over and try to do better this time around.

No one is perfect, no one is flawless, and loving someone means admitting they have faults. It means loving them, not in spite of those flaws, but because of them.

Popularity is teenage heroin.

I know," I say, slapping the ash off my palm. The words rush from my mouth before she says them. It's easier to hear it in my own voice. "I ruined your body. Killed your husband.

While there are memories I wish I could dispose of, sometimes my memories are the only things that keep me sane.

I hate Jesse for leaving me behind. If he asked, I would have walked into the air with him.

I didn't even need to check my phone to know that the universe had shrunk again, and the stars had vanished.
No. They hadn't vanished. I'd given them away to someone who hadn't deserved them, and I'd never get them back.

(M)emories are often amalgams of truth and fiction, sewn together in our heads by our subconscious to support our personal beliefs about the world.

The world pretty much sucks. But the bad shit that happens doesn't cancel out the good. I mean, a world with people like you in it can't be totally crap, right?

And I stood there and took it because I was an object. We were all objects to Marcus McCoy.

If you knew the world was going to end, but you had the power to stop it, would you?"
"Yes."
"Why?"
"Because Jesse believed that life wasn't worth living, and I refuse to prove him right.

Maybe some doors that slam shut behind you and can't ever be opened again aren't the scariest things in the world after all. Maybe some doors are better off closed. That way we can focus on the ones still open in front of us.

It's impossible to let go of the people we love. Pieces of them remain embedded inside of us like shrapnel. Every breath causes those fragments to burrow through our muscles, nearer to our hearts. And we think the pain will kill us, but it won't. Eventually, scar tissue forms around those twisted splinters like cocoons. They remain part of us, but slowly hurt less.

... even though we were surrounded by Diego's naked soul, I was the one who felt exposed.

But two people can love each other and still not belong together, even if neither of them wanted to admit it.

I can't help thinking that if we live long enough, we'll all eventually forget the lives we've lived. The faces of people closest to us, the memories we swore we'd hold on to for the rest of our lives. First kisses and last kisses and all the passion between the years...Memories aren't currency to spend; they're us.

But I do believe that every single thing we've done leads to everything we do, and that it's kind of pointless to regret the past when it's the cause of our present.

Sometimes I wish I'd find a zipper on the back of my head so I could unzip my skin and find the real me underneath.

But that's not even the worst part. What's really going to send you running over the side of the nearest bridge is that none of it matters. I'll die, you'll die, we'll all die, and the things we've done, the choices we've made, will amount to nothing.

If a kid looks like he doesn't give a shit, it's not because he doesn't believe in himself anymore; it's because no one else believes in him.