young-adult-fiction

Jo told me once that she was an old woman everywhere but in her studio. __here I__ only myself,_ she__ said. Standing in the middle of masterpieces that only Jo had ever seen and touched, I knew what she meant.

I worried I would miss it, and I knew, from losing Wyatt, that things happen the moment the soul is released. Wyatt had been there in the school, watching me, making sure I survived. Souls linger_they do. They linger a bit before they turn toward eternity. It could be that no matter how perfect their future will be, the past still tugs for a moment.

Look at this one._ I picked up a small painting of a man with dark hair and a short, dark beard. He wore a loose shirt, cobalt blue, unbuttoned at the top, showing a prominent, knobby collarbone. He looked_complicated and hungry. She__ captured him focused intensely on a book, his face pressed against a wall like he was resting. Or waiting.

My mom told me once that Wyatt loved her the way a boy will love his mother, but I loved her the way an artist loves another. Jo taught me what that meant.

I__ stumbled upon the inner sanctuary of a woman who loved the world. Loved the faces of people she saw. Loved the way a hand looked when it was relaxed. Loved the way a woman looked when she touched her own face. The way a man looked when he opened himself to her. Loved the way wind changed a tree or a field or a child__ hair. The beauty of a neck meeting a shoulder. The softness of a smile that wasn__ forced.

On some deep, unconscious level, he had always known it to be true. He was an invention, a fictional character. Jacob Lightfoot didn't exist.

Most people think that love doesn__ stand the test of time _ that it is eternal only as long as it lasts _ but love is an unquenchable flame. It is only the fires of momentary desire that burn too fast and go out far too quickly without leaving behind a single trace.

This unrequited love business was driving him crazy. It was a feeling that took you over, mind, body, and soul. Worse than a drug that tore apart your flesh and spirit, and without which you simply could not live.

She had feared the worst, and even though at that very moment she would have liked to wring her neck, she was happy to learn that suicide was not one of the stupid things that Eve had in her repertoire. Suicide made no sense: situations change, people change, and the problems of today may find a solution tomorrow. So long as you__e in the game you can change the final score, but if you take yourself out of it, you__l never know how it might have ended, and you let the world win.

One can learn from what is not said.

Woe is the mind of the common man, so easily controlled by the prospect of an ambition never to be truly attained. This is what tyrants live on and by what commoners are blissfully burdened and subdued.

the bleakest situations bring out the hospitality in all of us, but it's during the harshest we find out how strong we really are.

there are some some times in life where you have to let your feelings go and do what must be done

Respect the dead, learn from them, do not follow or avenge them.

There is no right or wrong, only what we believe is more right or more wrong

With the threat of them being potential spies or saboteurs, nobody will argue against our actions, and history itself will vindicate us.

War was easy. The hard part was cleaning up afterward.

Even though we don't admit it, every single one of us aspires to be like somebody, whether they live in the world today, within the bard's lyrics, or on the pages in the Library