amy

Send me all the advice you like. I'll use as much as I can.

Love is inaudible__ntil you hear it. And once you do, you__l never forget the sound of her voice._

He pulled out a dagger from ... she wasn't sure where. Did he have that in his loin cloth? What else does he have in there? (Amy's thoughts, The Witching Pen)

I hadn__ gone to Andover, or Horace Mann or Eton. My high school had been the average kind, and I__ been the best student there. Such was not the case at Eli. Here, I was surrounded by geniuses. I__ figured out early in my college career that there were people like Jenny and Brandon and Lydia and Josh__ruly brilliant, truly luminous, whose names would appear in history books that my children and grandchildren would read, and there were people like George and Odile__ho through beauty and charm and personality would make the cult of celebrity their own. And then there were people like me. People who, through the arbitrary wisdom of the admissions office, might share space with the big shots for four years, might be their friends, their confidantes, their associates, their lovers__ut would live a life well below the global radar. I knew it, and over the years, I__ come to accept it.And I understood that it didn__ make them any better than me.

I feel like Amy wanted people to believe she really was perfect. And as we got to be friends, I got to know her. And she wasn't perfect. You know? She was brilliant and charming and all that, but she was also controlling and OCD and a drama queen and a bit of a liar. Which was fine by me. It just wasn't fine by her. She got rid of me because I knew she wasn't perfect.

Whether people need nature or not, it was clear that nature needed people. But perhaps nature needs us like a hostage needs her captors: nature needs us not to annihilate her, not to run her over, not to cover her with cement, not to chop her down. We can hardly admire ourselves, then, when we stop to accommodate nature's needs: we are dubious heroes who create peril and then save it's victims, we who rescue the animals and the trees from ourselves.

Don__ ask a writer what he__ working on. It__ like asking someone with cancer on the progress of his disease.

He stood and looked at me for a moment, taking in my outfit. "You look hot.""What? Me?" I stammered, completely flummoxed."Yeah," he said, still looking at me."Oh. Um, thank you. I mean, not that you don__, but I__ not sure that you should__ mean _""Oh, no," Roger said quickly, and I could see that he was blushing again. "No. I mean__ meant what you__e wearing. Are you going to be too warm?

The Amy of today was abrasive enough to want to hurt, sometimes. I speak specifically of the Amy of today, who was only remotely like the woman I fell in love with. It had been an awful fairy-tale reverse transformation. Over just a few years, the old Amy, the girl of the big laugh and the east ways, literally shed herself, a pile of skin and soul on the floor, and out stepped this new, brittle, bitter Amy. My wife was no longer my wife but a razor-wire knot daring me to unloop her, and I was not up to the job with my thick, numb, nervous fingers. Country fingers. Flyover fingers untrained in the intricate, dangerous work of solving Amy. When I'd hold up the bloody stumps, she'd sigh and turn to her secret mental notebook on which she tallied all my deficiencies, forever noting disappointments, frailties, shortcomings. My old Amy, damn, she was fun. She was fun. She made me laugh. I'd forgotten that. And she laughed, From the bottom of her throat, from right behind that small finger-shaped hollow, which is the best place to laugh from. She released her grievances like handfuls of birdseed: They are there, and they are gone.

I have a question for you, but it__ kind of...um, personal._ __es, I__ gay._ __ou really are a fan of saying that, aren__ you?_ __nce you start, you just can__ stop.

I'm crazy about him and I'm crazy without him!

Never regret trusting someone. It proves you have a heart. But if he turns out to be a lying worm ... I'm not going to waste my time crying. Because I am way too fabulous for that.

I g-g-guess...I'm dead?" she heard her own voice call out, strangely high-pitched and thin.For a long time, she heard nothing else. And then:"Hi, Dead. I'm Dan.

P__amie!_ I called. He waded back toward me. ____ starting to think my name is Pajamie._ __our name should be Pajerky. You said it wasn__ deep._ __ajerky?_ He gave me a skeptical look. __hat__ Pathetic._ __e__l see how smug you are once I__ on dry land.

Because they are mean is no reason why I should be. I hate such things, and though I think I've a right to be hurt, I don't intend to show it. (Amy March)

I gaze out, to the stars. I remember the first time I saw real stars, through the hatch window. They were beautiful then, but now, seeing them here, all around me, beautiful feels like an inadequate word. I see the stars as a part of the universe, and having spent my life behind walls, suddenly having none fills me with both awe and terror. Emotion courses through my veins, choking me. I feel so insignificant, a tiny speck surrounded by a million stars.A million suns.Centuries away is Sol. Circling around it is Sol-Earth, the planet Amy came from. And one of these other stars is the Centauri binary system, where the new planet spins, waiting for us.And here we are, in the middle, surrounded by a sea of stars.Any of them could hold a planet. Any of them could hold a home.But all of them are out of reach.

Amy pulls away and looks into my face. Her pale skin is blotchy red, her eyes are veined and shadowed, and a shiny line of snot trickles from her nose to the top of he

I don't know if anyone can ever really explain why they believe in someone. But I do. I believe in you. I hope that's worth something.