Inbetweeners 2 Quotes

Sometimes the hardest place to live is the one in-between.

Listen to me. The two most important decisions in our lives are not ours to make. Our creation and our death. We don’t choose to be born, and we don’t choose when or how we die. But everything in-between? That’s our jurisdiction. We can fill in the blanks as we please.

The Earth dark and quiet, the way it was before we showed up to fill it with noise and light. Something ends. Something new begins. This was the in-between time. The pause.

It's the in-between, the sustenance, not just the gears and bolts that make a human. When you forget to find out how the person was built—the oil, chemistry, and the craft—you miss all the beauty.

Sometimes the hardest place to live is the one in-between. And sometimes in-between is all you’ll ever get.

You move, I want to fuck you. You smile, I want to hug you. You challenge me, I want to kill you. There is no in-between with you. I love you so much I hate you.

Please forgive me for fighting against us, Gavin. Please forgive me for not fighting for us when I knew we were supposed to be together. Forgive me for being the weak mess I am. But more than anything… thank you for loving me. Thank you for your dimpled smile and your bottle caps. I’ll never be able to look at one without thinking of you. Thank you for your stupid Yankees and your wiseass remarks. Thank you for wanting late night drives and sunset-watching with me. Thank you for wanting the good, the bad, and the in-between.

Those of noble soul will always do what is right regardless of immediate outside consequences or judgement.

Take us to the in-between, Where earth meets sky, and wake meets dream. And time rushes by, unseen. Take us to the infinite night, Where up is down, and left is right, And dark vanquishes light.

We are all only men, defined by our choices.

Do you love me, Jet? Despite it all, do you love me?” “Ayden, I’m here. Of course I love you. I loved you before, I love you after, and Ill love you for everything in-between.

I thank God for every minute you’ve ever given me. Even the bad minutes.” He paused, bringing his face closer. “You told me once you thought you’d broken us. You didn’t break us, doll. You fixed us. Those bad minutes shaped us into what we are. They molded us into what we’re going to be together. We were written for one another, and I wouldn’t change one line in our romance novel. The good, the bad, the in-between. It’s ours. We own it.

I throw myself into him, letting him fill the empty hollow places being away from him. I'm already wrapped around him, but I push closer. He tightens his hold on me. Honestly, if I could fit myself into his skin and rest in-between his bones, right now, I would.

You live an unlife instead,” I said. I held the ring before me and looked at it. It was old, tarnished, and even a little ugly. “An unlife, a not-death. You exist in the in-between spaces, between sleep and waking, between belief and imagination. I wish I could wake up, mein Herr. I wish I were awake.

We are the voices of the trees, Willa, and he words of the wolves, We are the force that carries the birds in the sky and the magic that turns the sunlight into life. We are the parts that are missing, the invisible, the in-between. When we live and when we die, we are the soul of the forest, in whatever form it must take.

You told me once you thought you’d broken us. You didn’t break us, doll. You fixed us. Those bad minutes shaped us into what we are. They molded us into what we’re going to be together. We were written for one another, and I wouldn’t change one line in our romance novel. The good, the bad, the in-between. It’s ours. We own it.

With wisdom comes responsibility. Somewhere along the way, I misplaced both.

The old adage of forgive and forget became a trudge through quicksand on a beach as high tide crashed onto the shore.

Letting new cities die and blaming ’em for it! So either sit your bitch asses down, or shut the fuck up and help. Do or die, show and prove. Can’t be no in-between.

You couldn’t half-ass parenthood. It wasn’t a lazy Sunday morning fuck. Either you were completely in or you were completely out. Anything in-between was a mindfuck to the kid

A shudder, a plunge, a second of darkness, and I'm back in the in-between.

That’s the problem of today’s generation. You want all the things quickly. You all hate to struggle. You see the life into two extremes, either success or failure, either rich or broke, either victory or defeat. You see the life in all black and white, but there are various shades of gray in-between two extremes of black and white and life happens to be there.

The In-Between somehow makes you feel grimy, like all those sights and sounds and sensations and smells have stuck to you, like you've been rolling around in a preschool art class's trash can.

The silence was perhaps the very definition of us. We would get enthralled in the clutches of an arbitrary, impalpable almost. An almost kiss. An almost truth. An almost surrender. We were never nothing, never something. We were ever stuck in a lethargic, amorphous in-between. Until all the unsaid things transformed into misshapen interpretations of ourselves. A severe interruption between who we were and who we could have been. Until the silence became an atrocity. Something unbeatable and grotesque. And we would have to turn away from it, so we didn’t have to look at what we’d done.

The two most important decisions in our lives are not ours to make. Our creation and our death. We don’t choose to be born, and we don’t choose when or how we die. But everything in-between? That’s our jurisdiction.

For many disabled people, there is also a specific type of intimacy, which Mia Mingus calls access intimacy. Access intimacy is not just for disabled people; it can also be experienced by many other people who might share experiences of marginalization, such as people of color or trans people. Mia describes access intimacy as “that elusive, hard to describe feeling when someone else “gets” your access needs. The kind of eerie comfort that your disabled self feels with someone on a purely access level.”2 Mia goes on to talk about how it can happen with people with whom there are long-lasting relationships and people we’ve just met. Mia describes access intimacy also as the closeness that emerges from “an automatic understanding of access needs out of our shared similar lived experience of the many different ways ableism manifests in our lives.

Little textual note for you here (bear with me). Those of you unfortunate enough not to be reading or hearing this in Marain may well be using a language without the requisite number or type of personal pronouns, so I’d better explain that bit of the translation. Marain, the Culture’s quintessentially wonderful language (so the Culture will tell you), has, as any schoolkid knows, one personal pronoun to cover females, males, in-betweens, neuters, children, drones, Minds, other sentient machines, and every life-form capable of scraping together anything remotely resembling a nervous system and the rudiments of language (or a good excuse for not having either). Naturally, there are ways of specifying a person’s sex in Marain, but they’re not used in everyday conversation; in the archetypal language-as-moral-weapon-and-proud-of-it, the message is that it’s brains that matter, kids; gonads are hardly worth making a distinction over.

Today, I go east. It’s one of my favorite times of day: that perfect in-between moment when the light has a liquid feel, like a slow pour of syrup. Still, I can’t shake loose the knot of unhappiness in my chest. I can’t shake loose the idea that the rest of our lives might simply look like this: this running, and hiding, and losing the things we love, and burrowing underground, and scavenging for food and water. There will be no turn in the tide. We will never march back into the cities, triumphant, crying out our victory in the streets. We will simply eke out a living here until there is no living to be eked.

Arches and doorways have their own magic, their own mystery. Moving through them, standing beneath them, we are in the in-between, the twilight, the passage. There's an unspoken danger, the threat of being lost or forgotten. It's why a husband carries his bride over the threshold – so he can protect her from any harm, any pain. It's all I want – to shelter you from harm, to give you the happiness you've given me. I want to step into that life with you. Because together, we can survive anything. I promise to carry you through life, to comfort and protect you. To keep you safe. You asked me once what my passion was, and I've finally found it. It's you.

In the ending, we lose or let go of our old outlook, our old reality, our old attitudes, our old values, our old self-image.2 We may resist this ending for a while. We may try to talk ourselves out of what we are feeling, and when we do give in, we may be swept by feelings of sadness and anger. Why is this happening to me? My friends aren't troubled by such things! •​Next, we find ourselves in the neutral zone between the old and new—yet not really being either the old nor the new. This confusing state is a time when our lives feel as though they have broken apart or gone dead. We get mixed signals, some from our old way of being and some from a way of being that is still unclear to us. Nothing feels solid. Everything is up for grabs. Yet for that very reason, it is a time when we sometimes feel that anything is possible. So the in-between time can be a very creative time too. •​Finally, we take hold of and identify with some new outlook and some new reality, as well as new attitudes and a new self-image. When we have done this, we feel that we are finally starting a new chapter in our lives. No matter how impossible it was to imagine a future earlier, life now feels as though it is back on its track again. We have a new sense of ourselves, a new outlook, and a new sense of purpose and possibility.

The next morning was the second time Kate awoke in Rohan's bed since her arrival at the castle. But unlike that first bewildering day, this time, when she opened her eyes to the morning sunlight flooding his chamber, he was the first lovely thing she saw, right there beside her. In no hurry to arise, they stayed peacefully abed together. She passed a dreamy spell stroking her drowsing lover's bare back in tender affection. What a long, majestic line it was that flowed from the bulky ridge of his shoulder down to the sleek, lean curve of his lower back. Of course, he had more scars on him than one body ought to bear, she thought, but he was not inclined to answer her mild inquiries about them. "What happened here?" she murmured, tracing what appeared to be a saber scar along his rib cage. Lying on his stomach, his face resting on his folded arms, he feigned an in-between state of sleepy inattention, though he was clearly enjoying her touch. "Hm?" She saw through his evasion but forgave him with a knowing smile. Whatever trouble he had been in, it hadn't killed him. That was all that mattered. She leaned closer and kissed all his old hurts. Her light kisses soon followed the same path her admiring hands had taken, until at length, he rolled onto his backhand showed her the regal evidence of her effect on him. He drew her closer, wanting to make love again, but she was still sore from her first time and softly pleaded his forbearance. With a husky chuckle at her reluctant denial, he stole a kiss, gave her a ruefully doting look, then arose in all his magnificent naked glory to order a bath for both of them.

Here is an important twist you need to understand. God doesn’t create heaven and hell. We do. Whatever plane of consciousness we find ourselves in after the body drops away is a world of our own making, according to the Hindu seers. If our thoughts have been predominantly cheerful and benevolent, our after-death experience is similar. If our thoughts have been filled with violence and anger, our afterlife will be, too. The climate in the life after death is the atmosphere of our own minds. Our karma—the mental vectors we’ve created by our thoughts and actions—carries us to a high state, a low state, or an okay in-between state. We’re in control—if we’re living life consciously. If we’re not directing our lives with awareness, then the unconscious tendencies stored in our subtle body take control when we die. For many Hindus, a long stay in heaven is just what the doctor ordered, and some Hindus devote considerable effort to building up enough karmic velocity to transport them into a higher world after they jettison their bodies. Eventually, the karmic forces that propelled you into a disembodied realm peters out. Your stay in that world is up—it’s time to return to a physical body. You remember how much you enjoyed sex. You remember how much you enjoyed whipped cream puffs. You remember how much you wanted to go to Mars. You remember that your brother-in-law owes you $3,000. Your unfulfilled desires draw you back to an appropriate physical body and—poof!—here you are again. The obstetrician is cutting your umbilical cord and slapping your bottom while you wail helplessly at the indignity. You traded the old model in for a new vehicle. Hopefully, thanks to good karma, you’ve traded up.

If Jim was back at the imaginary dinner party, trying to explain what he did for a living, he'd have tried to keep it simple: clearing involved everything that took place between the moment someone started at trade — buying or selling a stock, for instance — and the moment that trade was settled — meaning the stock had officially and legally changed hands. Most people who used online brokerages thought of that transaction as happening instantly; you wanted 10 shares of GME, you hit a button and bought 10 shares of GME, and suddenly 10 shares of GME were in your account. But that's not actually what happened. You hit the Buy button, and Robinhood might find you your shares immediately and put them into your account; but the actual trade took two days to complete, known, for that reason, in financial parlance as 'T+2 clearing.' By this point in the dinner conversation, Jim would have fully expected the other diners' eyes to glaze over; but he would only be just beginning. Once the trade was initiated — once you hit that Buy button on your phone — it was Jim's job to handle everything that happened in that in-between world. First, he had to facilitate finding the opposite partner for the trade — which was where payment for order flow came in, as Robinhood bundled its trades and 'sold' them to a market maker like Citadel. And next, it was the clearing brokerage's job to make sure that transaction was safe and secure. In practice, the way this worked was by 10:00 a.m. each market day, Robinhood had to insure its trade, by making a cash deposit to a federally regulated clearinghouse — something called the Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation, or DTCC. That deposit was based on the volume, type, risk profile, and value of the equities being traded. The riskier the equities — the more likely something might go wrong between the buy and the sell — the higher that deposit might be. Of course, most all of this took place via computers — in 2021, and especially at a place like Robinhood, it was an almost entirely automated system; when customers bought and sold stocks, Jim's computers gave him a recommendation of the sort of deposits he could expect to need to make based on the requirements set down by the SEC and the banking regulators — all simple and tidy, and at the push of a button.

There's no such thing as winning or losing. There is a wo and a lost; there is victory and defeat. There are absolutes. Everything in-between is still left to fight for.

But she only sank into that natural state of being and that little awake-and-wondering part of her mind found it interesting that a person can be completely unaware of breathing, ignoring it until the mechanism stops, or a person can be completely aware and able to command breathing like when there’s a birthday cake involved, but the in-between is the tricky part.

​I no longer had to worry if I was crazy. I wasn’t. Ghosts were real. Demons were real. Grim Reaper was real. Heaven and Hell and everything in-between existed.

Whereas Eloise gravitated toward retro granny chic and was pulled together on a daily basis, I either looked like a high school student who had just rolled out of bed, thrown on leggings, and gone to class, or a full-blown escort. There was no in-between.

I was in an in-between again. I’d set up a new shrine without even realizing I was doing it,

Jason: Sometimes the hardest place to live is the one in-between.

To be in transit is to be in the process of leaving one thing, without having fully left it, and at the same time entering something else, without being fully a part of it.2 It is a gestation period of provisional, tentative identity when many different selves are possible and none are obvious. The psychology of this in-between period has been described as ambivalence: We oscillate between “holding on” and “letting go,” between our desire to rigidly clutch the past and the impulse to rush exuberantly into the future.3 Over a period of months or even years, we move back and forth between these poles as we explore new roles and possibilities. Rather than being a sign of one’s lack of readiness, this moving back and forth is in fact the key to successful transitioning. It is how we stave off premature closure until we have fully explored alternatives.

Marain, the Culture’s quintessentially wonderful language (so the Culture will tell you), has, as any schoolkid knows, one personal pronoun to cover females, males, in-betweens, neuters, children, drones, Minds, other sentient machines, and every life-form capable of scraping together anything remotely resembling a nervous system and the rudiments of language (or a good excuse for not having either). Naturally, there are ways of specifying a person’s sex in Marain, but they’re not used in everyday conversation; in the archetypal language-as-moral-weapon-and-proud-of-it, the message is that it’s brains that matter, kids; gonads are hardly worth making a distinction over.

Figure 5.2: Compass of emotions

{I want a story.} A story? {A story is the thing that proves something existed between life and death. I have lingered in-between for so long. I want…} It groped for the right word, reaching and failing. {I want something that is real. And I want life, or death, but not this nothingness between.} I blinked back my surprise. I wasn’t sure what I expected, but it wasn’t for Reshaye to wish for death. But then, wouldn’t I, if I lived as it did? We have work to do, I murmured. We will need to show them all what we’re capable of. And we will need to do it very carefully. But if you help me, Reshaye, I will find a way to give you a story. And I will find a way to give you death. {Why should I listen to you? You have betrayed me many times.} In the sparring ring. Max’s hands on my body. The way I had shut it out in the Mikov estate. I cannot prove my truth to you. You will just have to trust me.

Wildfire, do you not understand? I love who you are. Not what. Who you are, and who you were, and who you’re becoming. Your fire, your ashes, your everything in-between…

Even Cameron, who wanted nothing more than to put one right in-between City’s eyes, but he knew that he had to let his baby brother handle it.

There's a jangle to the music of the dead. I mean that certain something that's so happy and so sad at the same time. The notes almost make a perfect harmony but don't. Then they do but quickly crash into dissonance. They simmer in that sweet in-between, rhythm section rattling along all the while. Chords collapse chaotically into each other, and just when you think it's gonna spill into total nonsense, it stands back up and comes through sweet as a lullaby on your mami's lips. Songs that'll make people tap their feet and drink melancholically but not realize the twisting genius lurking within until generations later. That's the kind of music I make, and the dead do too. We make it together. *

There's a jangle to the music of the dead. I mean that certain something that's so happy and so sad at the same time. The notes almost make a perfect harmony, but don't. Then they do but quickly crash into dissonance. They simmer in that sweet in-between rhythm section rattling along all the while. Chords collapse chaotically into one another and just when you think it's gonna spill into total nonsense, it stands back up and comes through sweet as a lullaby on your mami's lips. Songs that'll make people tap their feet and drink melancholically but not realize the twisting genius lurking within until generations later.

Marain, the Culture’s quintessentially wonderful language (so the Culture will tell you), has, as any schoolkid knows, one personal pronoun to cover females, males, in-betweens, neuters, children, drones, Minds, other sentient machines, and every life-form capable of scraping together anything remotely resembling a nervous system and the rudiments of language (or a good excuse for not having either). Naturally, there are ways of specifying a person’s sex in Marain, but they’re not used in everyday conversation; in

All or nothing at all. If it’s love there is no in-between. Billie

Why?” I choked out. “Why would they do that?” “And how?” Siobhan said. “A whole House? All at once?” Caduan shook his head, still not looking away from the corpse. “I do not know.” “Perhaps it’s weaponry,” I said. “A way to kill them all, quickly.” “I know very well that they do not need to do this to kill. No. I think whatever this was, it was a failure.” He lifted his knife, pointing to the exposed innards of the body. “Even just over the last several hours, all of this has degraded. Her body is withering away as we speak. Her own blood is poisoning her. We didn’t kill this one. I found her beyond the walls, untouched by the fires. Likely drowned in her own dissolved organs. Slowly.” His voice was calm and level, but his knuckles were white around the handle of his blade. “I do not think,” he said, “that this is what the humans wanted to happen. I think that this is a failed experiment. They weren’t trying to destroy. They were trying to create. And what we are looking at now is a Fey caught in-between. Just as Aefe was caught in-between, last night.” His eyes flicked up to mine, bright and furious. “The land itself was corrupted, there. Don’t tell me that you did not feel it as I did.

The dots started to jump. Then they stopped. Then they started again. Jason: I’m sorry to hear that. There was a pause between texts while he typed again. Jason: Sometimes the hardest place to live is the one in-between.

Kristen was right. I’d chosen this life. And I’d had enough. I was going to make a concerted effort to get out of this in-between I was trapped in. I was going to actively pursue joy. I’d cook. I’d maybe start updating my blog again. I had too many paying commissions to be able to dedicate time to painting any of my own stuff, but maybe eventually I’d even get back to that too. And I was going to start now. Not for Jason. Not because he was here to reap the benefits. For myself. I should have done it a long time ago.

When they reached the other side of the in-between, Enzo realised that adventure was a euphemism for nearly have your bags stolen, get into a fist-fight, and have Elara exercise her nightmares on a woman who had tried to take him by the hand and lead him to her rooms—all within half an hour.

There is little point in trying to convince those insane to the contrary. Those insane are convinced already of their sanity. That has been one saving-grace through the centuries that has kept me lucid, protected from the clutches of eventual depravity: if you consciously consider yourself insane, then you are not. I'm not yet insane, my dear, but I damn well am certain I'm batshit.

Somewhere, a seabord cawed. Waves called from nearby, convincing her to dive in. To drown herself. But she refused them. At the end of a pleasant afternoon spent wandering up and down the beachfront, buffeted by an offshore change, she looked to the tangerine clouds in the sky and told them, 'Launch the Elysian Armada.

As much as it pained me to admit it, he was fucking right, too. You couldn’t half-ass parenthood. It wasn’t a lazy Sunday morning fuck. Either you were completely in or you were completely out. Anything in-between was a mindfuck to the kid, and I had to remember that, now more than ever.

Either let her in, or let her go. This in-between shit isn’t fair to her.

He was the beginning and the end and all the space in-between. The moon’s kiss and the sun’s heat. He was fire, and he was mine.

What a waste of my life," it said, the chuckles slipping into defeated sighs. "I thank you all for allowing me to learn the ways of the human race. But I had hoped better things could have blossomed from this peculiar relationship that has been allowed to prosper; but like all livings things, even my indestructible kind, they wither and die. We don't live forever, but we have been deluded into imagining that we do." The alien gave a series of fleshy clicking sounds that grated from its hind throat like the abrasion of ribbed, hollow wooden pipes. "And this disgusting light burns me.

I never wanted to break anyone or anything,' reassured the alien visionary. 'I only ever wanted to make things greater, to nurture forthcoming concepts into being, to spur on growth. I suppose I was simply born into the wrong species; my race - as outcast from them as I am - versus yours in this deciding clash of technology and wits, prevents destined advancements; as divisive as this barrier of fear that blinds all things.

Above all this, were one to glance up, would be an infinite expanse of depthless, star-studded black, watching intently, pretending as though it cared even remotely what occurred beneath its immensity, positioned there purposefully to remind the daring observer that all remained insubstantial, and that the darkness throughout the valley could only grow as dark as the darkness up there. Never darker.

And from the blazing wreckage of your sister, and in her memory,' Langford announced, 'shall that memory remain everlasting, I thusly name you Hope Descendant. Carry that name in remembrance!' But she had wanted to say something else, something likely true but unproven until the future became the past: carry that name in remembrance, for we will all undoubtedly forget.

To those who whisper, bearing eternally the truths of the Primordial Masters that oversee reality, I am known only as the Arch Alpha-Primarius.

From now, Mankind is at war with itself, but not over politics or resources or finance, but instead for survival. I believe that alone is enough to prevent you from gathering yourselves. Knowing what lays dormant in your cities, and possibly in your own homes, will forever nibble at your subconscious, prodding you, pushing you all into a life of constant suspicion and paranoia, emotions amplified by the raging fear of everyone around and by the self-scrutinisation of unknowing whether you do or do not carry the cancer yourself.

But where there should be blackness, there was light, impossible, implausible light, a tiny speck that shimmered every colour of the spectrum and every colour not of the spectrum. It played with colours not even of the universe, toying to create the most impossible things. It twinkled like the central jewel set deep into a diadem of black-body, refracting reality itself into a disco of primordial knowledge, submerged far under turbulent waters of incomprehension.

...and, finally, there were the whispers of the detriments nurtured by achieving the highest disciplinary plateau of critical epistemological analysis. "Some questions are just never meant to be answered. Those closest to yourself.

There was a lot of work to be done before, to reach the end of the beginning. It was almost too much to handle.' She paused to take a breath, reaffirming her hold around his waist. 'But the end of the beginning only gives way to everything else that follow, so unfortunately for us, our work has not yet concluded. "This is only the beginning of the end. "And so we cannot rest, not us; not yet, and possibly not ever.

You said that you were going to be my first kiss and you were going to be my last." Letting out a sob she continues, "You said whatever happens in-between them doesn't mean anything" "It doesn't mean shit," I correct and place my head on her forehead. "It doesn't mean shit. I was your first and I am going to be your last, Emmalyn, and everything that has happened in-between doesn't mean shit.

A growth of beard darkened the lower half of his face. His valet would not be pleased if he saw him, but Violet was beyond pleased at the sight. She had never seen a man thus. They were either clean-shaven, or had fully developed beards. There must be some in-between phase, but she had never seen it. In the evenings on their trip, he would sometimes have a light growth that he must have shaved off by himself, because he appeared clean-shaven in the mornings. But this was probably a couple of days' worth. Her fingertips itched to rake over it and feel if it would scrape her skin or be soft to the touch. It made him appear rugged in a way that she found extremely appealing, as if the proper English gentleman had been undone to give way to this man who was far more carnal and raw.

Marain, the Culture’s quintessentially wonderful language (so the Culture will tell you), has, as any schoolkid knows, one personal pronoun to cover females, males, in-betweens, neuters, children, drones, Minds, other sentient machines, and every life-form capable of scraping together anything remotely resembling a nervous system and the rudiments of language (or a good excuse for not having either). Naturally, there are ways of specifying a person’s sex in Marain, but they’re not used in everyday conversation