Rob Sheffield

“It’s not human to let go of love, even when it’s dead. We expected one of these monthlyanniversaries to be the Final Goodbye. We figured that we’d said all our goodbyes, and given up all the tears we had to give. We’d passed the testand would get back what we’d lost. But instead, every anniversary it hurt more, and every anniversary it felt like she was further away from comingback. The idea that there wouldn’t be a final goodbye—that was a hard goodbye to say in itself and, at that point, still an impossible goodbye. Noprivate eye has to tell you it’s a long goodbye.”

“Did I learn anything? No way. But all the things you want to learn fromgrief turn out to be the total opposite of what you actually learn. There are no revelations, no wisdoms as a trade-off for the things you have lost. Youjust get stupider, more selfish. Colder and grimmer. You forget your keys. You leave the house and panic that you won’t remember where you live.You know less than you ever did. You keep crossing thresholds of grief and you think, Maybe this one will unveil some sublime truth about life anddeath and pain. But on the other side, there’s just more grief.”

“And they’re right—what could be scarier, stupider, thanstaying together? How else could you totally guarantee that you would always have reasons to be terrified?”

“I don’t know what your type is. I don’t know what your deal is. I don’t even know if you have a boyfriend. I know I like you and I want to be in yourlife, that’s it, and if you have any room for a boyfriend, I would like to be your boyfriend, and if you don’t have any room, I would like to be your friend.Any room you have for me in your life is great. If you would like me to start out in one room and move to another, I could do that.”

“Before I met Maria, I was your basic craven hermit. I spent most of my time in my room, in love with my walls, hiding out from the world with myfanzines and my records. I thought I was happier that way. I had developed these monastic habits to protect myself from something, probably, butwhatever it was, the monastic habits had turned into the bigger problem. In my headphones, I led a life of romance and incident and intrigue, noneof which had anything to do with the world outside my Walkman. I was an English major, obsessed with Oscar Wilde and Walter Pater and AlgernonSwinburne, thrilling to the exploits of my decadent aesthete poet idols, even though my only experience with decadence was reading about it.”

“What is love? Great minds have been grappling with thisquestion through the ages, and in the modern era, they havecome up with many different answers. According to the Westernphilosopher Pat Benatar, love is a battlefield. Her paisan FrankSinatra would add the corollary that love is a tender trap. Thestoner kids who spent the summer of 1978 looking cool on thehoods of their Trans Ams in the Pierce Elementary Schoolparking lot used to scare us little kids by blasting the Sweet hit“Love Is Like Oxygen”—you get too much, you get too high,not enough and you’re gonna die. Love hurts. Love stinks. Lovebites, love bleeds, love is the drug. The troubadours of our timesall agree: They want to know what love is, and they want you toshow them.But the answer is simple. Love is a mix tape.”

“The radio tape puts you right back in the original time and place when you first heard the songs. You arethere, my friend.”

“The country singers understand. It’s always that one song that gets you. You can hide, but the song comes to find you. Country singers are alwaystwanging about that number on the jukebox they can’t stand to hear you play, the one with the memories.”

“Neither of us ever threw anything away. We madea lot of mix tapes while we were together. Tapes for making out, tapes for dancing, tapes for falling asleep. Tapes for doing the dishes, for walkingthe dog. I kept them all. I have them piled up on my bookshelves, spilling out of my kitchen cabinets, scattered all over the bedroom floor. I don’teven have pots or pans in my kitchen, just that old boom-box on the counter, next to the sink. So many tapes.”

“Listening to it now is like a personally guided tour through my past.”

“Don't charge the mound. Once you agree to fight, you lost already. Don't start none, won't be none.”

“I had never gotten the hang of dating — I was always going to be somebody who either had a girlfriend or didn't.”

“I was somebody's boyfriend now. This would mean a lot of trial and error. But she was who I wanted to try and err with.”

“Learning, over and over. The work of love will make you bloody and it will make you lonely.”

“I was too young to know adult life is full of accidents and interrupted moments and empty beds you climb into and don't climb out of.”

“My ears rang all the way home and I didn't want them to stop. It made me want to start something.”

“I felt indestructible, or at least undestroyed, more alive than I'd ever been.”

“Rock stars did not invent burning out. They just do it louder.”

“I've played the song for a lot of people who respond, 'Hmmmm, this is interesting,' but in a way it's more like 'There are two exits in this room, the window and the door. If this song doesn't end soon, I'm going to opt for the window.”

“By the time you're an adult, you're used to seeing your friends disappear into their five-year plans. They drop out to get married, have babies, go to grad school, get divorced. They start a band or enter the penal system. They vanish for years at a time - some come back, some don't. Some of them you wait for and some you let go. Sometimes the only way they come back is in a song.”

“i’m very expressive.i deserve to feel pretty.i kissed the blarney stone.i am strong. i am brave.im a good friend. I’m a good sister. I’m a good wife. i am a good in-law. I’m a good daughter. i am a good niece. I’m a good beagle mother. i am a good granddaughter.i work hard for it, honey.im superfly TNT motherfucker.im a pilot of the airwaves.im a better third baseman that brooks robinson.I B-E-A-G-G-R-E-S-S-I-V-E.i have exceptionally beautiful feet, eyes, ears, hips, hair, teeth, breasts. and shoulders. and fingernails. in a different pen, she added, and eyelashes and eyebrows, plus in yet another pen, and nose. and chin.”

“Don't go home with that magic man! I wanted to shake my Walkman, warn the Heart girls to run away. Don't trust him! He might be magic, but he's not very nice! He says he just wants to get high awhile, but he'll get you so high you can't come back down. He'll make you stay inside so long, it hurts your eyes to go out, so you'll spend whole years wasting away in his mansion. You'll lose your sense of time. You'll lose your appetite. When your mama cries on the phone, you won't understand a word she's saying. You'll just tell her, "Try to understand." And Mrs. Wilson isn't falling for that shit. Ann! Nance! Get the hell out of there. One smile from that magic man and you're done. You'll be so fucking magic, you won't be real anymore. He'll even set your lipgloss on fire.”

“I keep my friends around, try to stay close to them, try to treat them right. I try to stay in touch with my friends who are far away, and I do a bad job of that, but I carry them with me.”

“I still haven't finished unpacking - by the time I do, it'll be time to move again.”

“When you want to start living, what do you do? How do you start? Where do you go? Who do you need to blow?”

“You're in a physical landscape you share with this bizarre and fundamentally alien creature, not alien because she's female but alien because you're a fool in love and there's nothing not alien about that.”

“You lose a certain type of innocence when you experience this type of kindness. You lose your right to be a jaded cynic. You can no longer go back through the looking glass and pretend not to know what you know about kindness.”

“I knew I would have to relearn how to listen to music, and that some of the music we'd loved together I'd never be able to hear again.”

“The reality of boy-girl life gets harsh, but in my fantasy, the music keeps them together.”

“I hear the noise in his voice, and I hear a boy trying to scare the darkness away. I wish I could hear what happened next, but nothing did.”

“I grew up on country radio. You know I'm a sucker for that 'we got no money but we got love' crap.”

“Just more of that endless, useless knowledge you absorb when you're in a relationship, with no meaning or relevance outside of that relationship. When the relationship's gone, you're stuck knowing all this garbage.”

“It started off as a playful fantasy we talked about. Then the fantasy became a plan, the way fantasies sometimes do, and the plan became a future. It didn't hit us as the climax of anything, just the celebration of something that had already happened to us. I guess we hoped the celebration would help us understand what had happened.”

“I thought, there is nowhere else in the universe I would rather be at this moment... There is nowhere else I could imagine wanting to be besides here in this car, with this girl, on this road, listening to this song. If she breaks my heart, no matter what hell she puts me through, I can say it was worth it, just because of right now. Out the window is a blur and all I can really hear is this girl's hair flapping in the wind, and maybe if we drive fast enough the universe will lose track of us and forget to stick us somewhere else.”

“I was too scared to talk, but I was more scared to not talk.”

“Renee used to say real life was a bad country song, except bad country songs were believable and real life isn't.”

“In my headphones, I led a life of romance and incident and intrigue, none of which had anything to do with the world outside my Walkman.”

“He said 'My kingdom is not of this world.' So did Bowie. It tapped into the whole Catholic idea of creating your own saints, finding icons of divinity in the mundane. As a religion, Bowieism didn't seem so different from Catholicism - the hemlines were just a little higher.”

“Love hurts. Love stinks. Love bites, love bleeds, love is the drug. The troubadours of our times all agree: They want to know what love is, and they want you to show them. But the answer is simple. Love is a mix tape.”

“Dave Matthews is mixing violin solos with saxophone solos and it's bad for the baby”

“Some of us are born Gladys Knights, and some of us are born Pips.”

“Nothing connects to the moment like music.”

“I've never heard of anybody getting rid of their prized Exile postcards, much less actually writing on them and sending them through the mail to a girl. I watched these two, laughing over this story at the same kitchen table they've shared for thirty years. I realize that I will never fully understand the millions of bizarre ways that music brings people together.”

“I felt knots untie themselves, knots I didn't know were there. I could already tell there were things happening deep inside of me that were irreversible. Is there any scarier word than "irreversible"? It's a hiss of a word, full of side effects and mutilations. Severe tire damage - no backing up. Falling in love with Renee felt that way.”

“In some circles, admitting you love Top 40 radio is tantamount to bragging you gave your grandmother the clap, in church, in the front row at your aunt's funeral, but those are the circles I avoid like the plague or, for that matter, the clap.”

“The way I pictured it, all this grief would be like a winter night when you're standing outside. You'll warm up once you get used to the cold. Except after you've been out there for awhile, you feel the warmth draining out of you and you realize the opposite is happening; you're getting colder and colder, as the body heat you brought outside with you seeps out of your skin. Instead of getting used to it, you get weaker the longer you endure it.”

“...some people aren't worth the trouble of being kind to, because they have neither the brains nor the power to make something for themselves out of your kindness.”

“Not being able to protect her from things was the most frightening thing I'd ever felt, and it kicked in as soon as we got together. With every year we spent together, I became more conscious that I now had an infinitely expanding number of reasons to be afraid. I had something to lose.”

“Like any teenager who reads The Great Gatsby, probably, I was madly in love with the teacher who had opened it up for me.”

“We couldn't believe how exciting it was to be together, a pair of young Americruisers on a roll. We'd lived for just twenty-five years; we weren't planning to die for fifty more. We danced and drank and went to rock shows. Our lives were just beginning, our favorite moment was right now, our favorite songs were unwritten.”