Robyn Schneider

How many beers do y'all think it takes before one internationally scientist turns to another and says, 'Dude, bet you twenty bucks I can levitate a frog with a magnet?' ' Sam drawled.

If everything really does get better, the way everyone claims, then happiness should be graphable. But that's crap, because better isn't quantifiable.

It was like Latham: sometimes the point wasn't being the best, because it didn't mean you had the best life, or the best friends, or the best time.

The world tends toward chaos, you know," Cassidy said. You could too. Just write down a made up name, or even a fictional character. And the next person who finds this geocache, it's as though things really hapened that way. You have to at least allow for the possibility of it.

You're funny.' Phoebe passed me the last chocolate cupcake. 'And I always thought your friends were laughing over their own farts.''Ninety percent of Eastwood's male population laughs over their own farts. Present company excluded, naturally.

I wondered what things what things became when you no longer needed them, and I wondered what the future would hold once we'd gotten past our personal tragedies and proven them ultimately survivable.

You see? You're just figuring it out now, but I discovered a long time ago that the smarter you are, the more tempting it is to just let people imagine you. We move through each other's lives like ghosts, leaving behind haunting memories of people who never existed.

Words could betray you if you chose the wrong ones, or mean less if you used too many. Jokes could be grandly miscalculated, or stories deemed boring, and I'd learned early on that my sense of humor and ideas about what sorts of things were fascinating didn't exactly overlap with my friends'.

We mourn the future because it's easier than admitting that we're miserable in the present.

And I realized that there's a big difference between deciding to leave and knowing where to go.

I still think that everyone's life, no matter how unremarkable, has a singular tragic encounter after which everything that really matters will happen. That moment is the catalyst - the first step in the equation. But knowing the first step will get you nowhere - it's what comes after that determines the result.

We have all been fooled into believing in people who are entirely imaginary--made-up prisoners in a hypothetical panopticon. But the point isn't whether or not you believe in imaginary people; it's whether or not you want to."I think I'll stick with reality," I said, handing Cassidy back her phone.She stared at it, and then me, disappointed. "I'd think you of all people would want to escape.""Imaginary prisoners are still prisoners.

We're living tragedies, just passing time 'til our funerals.

Art is pain. And so is life.

It's strange how can lose things that are still right there. How a barrier can go up at any moment, trapping you on the other side, keeping you from what you want. How the things that hurt the most are things we once had.

In AP Bio, I learned that the cells in our body are replaced every seven years, which means that one day I'll have a body full of cells that were never sick. But it also means that the parts of me that knew and loved Sadie will disappear. I'll still remember loving her, but it'll be a different me who loved her. And maybe this is how we move on. We grow new cells to replace the grieving ones, diluting our pain until it loses potency.

..pain can't be taken away. It has to leave on its own. And I wasn't sure mine was the type of pain that wanted to go away.

I didn't realise you'd ridden here on your high horse