“here’s the sick, twisted thing: part of me thinks i deserve this. that maybe if i wasn’t such an asshole, isaac would have been real. if i wasn’t such a lame excuse for a person, something right might happen to me. it’s not fair, because i didn’t ask for dad to leave, and i didn’t ask to be depressed, and i didn’t ask for us to have no money, and i didn’t ask to want to fuck boys, and i didn’t ask to be so stupid, and i didn’t ask to have no real friends, and i didn’t ask to have half the shit that comes out of my mouth come out of my mouth. all i wanted was one fucking break, one idiotic good thing, and that was clearly too much to ask for, too much to want.”

“No, no, I don’t want that.”“I didn’t ask.”

“From Chloe's Secret--coming soon“What are you saying?”“I’m saying I want to have a relationship with you. I want to love you.”“Is there a ‘but’ coming next?”“But the funny thing is, when I didn’t want to love you—it happened anyway.”He slipped his arms into my back pockets and hugged the breath out of me. I choked, my eyes stung. “I don’t know what to say.”He smiled. “Say whatever you want to. Just because I said it, you don’t have to.”He was right; I didn’t have to. He wasn’t asking anything of me.”

“I didn’t list listening as one of my skills, probably because I didn’t hear what the interviewer asked.”

“I could have run after him. I could have asked politely for some clarification. But I didn’t I knew what I preferred, and that was—I didn’t want to know. Rather, I wanted to believe.”

“I felt after I finished Slaughterhouse-Five that I didn’t have to write at all anymore if I didn’t want to. It was the end of some sort of career. I don’t know why, exactly. I suppose that flowers, when they’re through blooming, have some sort of awareness of some purpose having been served. Flowers didn’t ask to be flowers and I didn’t ask to be me. At the end of Slaughterhouse-Five…I had a shutting-off feeling…that I had done what I was supposed to do and everything was OK .”