Quotes from Christopher Barzak

Don't ever put your happiness in someone else's hands. They'll drop it. They'll drop it every time.

Don't ever put your happiness in someone else's hands. They'll drop it. They'll drop it every time.

Nothing is more real than the masks we make to show each other who we are.

Sometimes you've got to be able to listen to yourself and be okay with no one else understanding.

The terrible thing about love is that it takes away your safety net, your balancing pole. Even the tightrope you walk upon will disappear beneath you, yet love expects you to keep walking anyway, arms outstretched, one foot after the other, on nothing more than air.

I tried. I tried to burn that memory of my regret. But I wasn't dead yet, I was just on my way to dying, and it's harder to burn memories when you've still got life left. When you're alive you have to learn how to live with things like regret.

I once heard my mother tell my sister love only comes at a price, there's no way around it. You give up parts of yourself for love, she said. If that's true, I thought, the cost of our love had risen. And despite wanting to be as real to you as you were to me, I couldn't afford us any longer. We were beyond my means.

Normal is a setting on a washing machine.

Here I'd been thinking that just because someone spoke English we'd understand each other. But I guess there are languages within languages, and those can be foreign, too, even when you think you're understanding each other.

Only so much truth can exist between two people until it becomes too much, and then they can't bear to be around each other.

Real strength isn't control. It's knowing when to let go.

Tokyo was an origami city folded over and over until something was made of virtually nothing.

Here's the thing: we're all as thin as paper. Like those paper people you used to find in old children's magazines, inhabiting a two-page spread with other paper people, all of them hanging out somewhere together-at the park, at church, at school, at the mall, on the family room-until some kid took a pair of scissors to the dotted lines surrounding them and cut them out of their paper world. That's us, that's anyone. That was me. A cut-out paper person removed from the world I once belonged to.

You're like a candle in a dark room, throwing light backwards and forwards.

Uncharted territory," I said. "The parts on the maps of our lives that we don't understand. In cartographer's language they call these places sleeping beauties.

My heart was defective. It was defecting a little more each day.

In Japan, people have something called their charm point. A coy smile, a twinkle in the eye, a faultless sense of humour, or a laugh no one has heard in the history of laughs before. The thing that makes others love you.

You're both treated fairly," she said, "but sometimes people require different things for true fairness.

Here they were, the people we were becoming, about to knock on our front door, hoping they could undo the mistakes we were making at that very moment.

You see, that's what's so odd, how everyone thinks they're normal and the truth is no one in the world is normal at all. Isn't that wonderful?

Everything about us was entirely normal, really. We were as ordinary as anything we might come across in this world.

That's what love hotels are for." "I know," says Ai, "but this man comes alone. He says he comes to this room and thinks about the lovers who have been here before him, imagines himself as one of them, imagines himself having someone to hold. He tells whoever is reading this that he's grateful for the love we share without knowing.

Just two people in love.

Leaves fell around me, red and gold stars falling through the mist.