Letter To My Crush Quotes

Love gives you wings. Icarus and the Challenger both had wings, and so did my first love letter, after I folded it up and flung it at my crush.


I believe that there lives a burning desire in the most sequestered private heart of every American, a desire to belong to a great country. I believe that every citizen wants to stand on the world stage and represent a noble country where the mighty do not always crush the weak and the dream of a democracy is not the sole possession of the strong.

My mom believed that you make your own luck. Over the stove she had hung these old, maroon painted letters that spell out, “MANIFEST.” The idea being if you thought and dreamed about the way you wanted your life to be -- if you just envisioned it long enough, it would come into being. But as hard as I had manifested Astrid Heyman with her hand in mine, her blue eyes gazing into mine, her lips whispering something wild and funny and outrageous in my ear, she had remained totally unaware of my existence. Truly, to even dream of dreaming about Astrid, for a guy like me, in my relatively low position on the social ladder of Cheyenne Mountain High, was idiotic. And with her a senior and me a junior? Forget it. Astrid was just lit up with beauty: shining blonde ringlets, June sky blue eyes, slightly furrowed brow, always biting back a smile, champion diver on the swim team. Olympic level. Hell, Astrid was Olympic level in every possible way.

When You Return Fallen leaves will climb back into trees. Shards of the shattered vase will rise and reassemble on the table. Plastic raincoats will refold into their flat envelopes. The egg, bald yolk and its transparent halo, slide back in the thin, calcium shell. Curses will pour back into mouths, letters un-write themselves, words siphoned up into the pen. My gray hair will darken and become the feathers of a black swan. Bullets will snap back into their chambers, the powder tamped tight in brass casings. Borders will disappear from maps. Rust revert to oxygen and time. The fire return to the log, the log to the tree, the white root curled up in the un-split seed. Birdsong will fly into the lark’s lungs, answers become questions again. When you return, sweaters will unravel and wool grow on the sheep. Rock will go home to mountain, gold to vein. Wine crushed into the grape, oil pressed into the olive. Silk reeled in to the spider’s belly. Night moths tucked close into cocoons, ink drained from the indigo tattoo. Diamonds will be returned to coal, coal to rotting ferns, rain to clouds, light to stars sucked back and back into one timeless point, the way it was before the world was born, that fresh, that whole, nothing broken, nothing torn apart.

One day, I’ll give you the annotated copy of my first novel. — Arya Kashyap

Didn’t you want to be anything?” said Ginger, putting a whole sentence-worth of disdain in a mere three letters. “Not really,” said Victor. “Everything looks interesting until you do it. Then you find it’s just another job. I bet even people like Cohen the Barbarian get up in the morning thinking, ‘Oh, no, not another day of crushing the jeweled thrones of the world beneath my sandalled feet.’” “Is that what he does?” said Ginger, interested despite herself. “According to the stories, yes.” “Why?” “Search me. It’s just a job, I guess.

...My husband made my dreams come true, and because he could do that I married him." Then he says softly, as if to himself, "But what about love?" She heard that. A slight smile comes to her lips. "Do you still have all the ideals, all the ideals that you took to that distant world with you? Are they all still intact , or have some of them died or withered away? Haven't they been torn out of you by force and flung in the dirt, where thousands of wheels carrying vehicles to their owners' destination in life crushed them? Or have you lost none of them?

I don’t date people or love people so easily. Neither do I leave them easily, but when I do, there’s no looking back. Maybe that’s why, when I fall in love, it becomes a huge deal; it becomes the most important thing in my life.

The crushed flowers and The scented letters Hidden between the pages, I hide them under the pillows, I take them on a trip, Sometimes, they lay in the cupboards The broken flowers still glow, The perfumed letters can Give the peace to my soul.

Artoo, I'm switching back to regular handwriting. Calligraphy is hard, and I didn't bring my good pens. Or I need more practice. Right now you're sitting across from me, probably writing HAGS 30 times in a row. I know a little bit of a lot of languages, but even so, I struggle to put this into words. Okay. I'm just going to do it. First of all, I need you to know I'm not putting this out there with any hope of reciprocation. This is something I have to get off my chest (cliché, sorry) before we go our separate ways (cliché). It's the last day of school, and therefore my last chance. "Crush" is too weak a word to describe how I feel. It doesn't do you justice, but maybe it works for me. I am the one who is crushed. I'm crushed that we have only ever regarded each other as enemies. I'm crushed when the day ends and I haven't said anything to you that isn't coated in five layers of sarcasm. I'm crushed, concluding this year without having known that you like melancholy music or eat cream cheese straight from the tub in the middle of the night or play with your bangs when you're nervous, as though you're worried they look bad. (They never do.) You're ambitious, clever, interesting, and beautiful. I put "beautiful" last because for some reason, I have a feeling you'd roll your eyes if I wrote it first. But you are. You're beautiful and adorable and so fucking charming. And you have this energy that radiates off you, a shimmering optimism I wish I could borrow for myself sometimes. You're looking at me like you can't believe I'm not done yet, so let me wrap this up before I turn it into a five-paragraph essay. But if this were an essay, here's the thesis statement: I'm in love with you, Rowan Roth. Please don't make too much fun of me at graduation? Yours, Neil P. McNair

Gospel The new grass rising in the hills, the cows loitering in the morning chill, a dozen or more old browns hidden in the shadows of the cottonwoods beside the streambed. I go higher to where the road gives up and there’s only a faint path strewn with lupine between the mountain oaks. I don’t ask myself what I’m looking for. I didn’t come for answers to a place like this, I came to walk on the earth, still cold, still silent. Still ungiving, I’ve said to myself, although it greets me with last year’s dead thistles and this year’s hard spines, early blooming wild onions, the curling remains of spider’s cloth. What did I bring to the dance? In my back pocket a crushed letter from a woman I’ve never met bearing bad news I can do nothing about. So I wander these woods half sightless while a west wind picks up in the trees clustered above. The pines make a music like no other, rising and falling like a distant surf at night that calms the darkness before first light. “Soughing” we call it, from Old English, no less. How weightless words are when nothing will do.

I skipped to the door of my building. Is there anything more glorious than new crushes on boys?

On October first, fifteen past eight. My heart was ringing, my soul was singing because he wasn’t just typing on the other side. He was writing on my heart with a permanent marker, in pink.

As for free will, there is such a narrow crack of it for man to move in, crushed as he is from birth by environment, heredity, time and event and local convention. If I had been born of Italian parents in one of the caves in the hills I would be a prostitute at the age of 12 or so because I had to live (why?) and that was the only way open. If I was born into a wealthy New York family with pseudo-cultural leanings, I would have had my coming-out party along with the rest of them, and be equipped with fur coats, social contacts, and a blase pout. How do I know? I don't; I can only guess. I wouldn't be I. But I am I now; and so many other millions are so irretrievably their own special variety of "I" that I can hardly bear to think of it. I: how firm a letter; how reassuring the three strokes: one vertical, proud and assertive, and then the two short horizontal lines in quick, smug succession. The pen scratches on the paper... I... I... I... I... I... I.

For it is silly, my dear Lucilius, and no way for an educated man to behave, to spend one’s time exercising the biceps, broadening the neck and shoulders and developing the lungs. Even when the extra feeding has produced gratifying results and you’ve put on a lot of muscle, you’ll never match the strength or the weight of a prize ox. The greater load, moreover, on the body is crushing to the spirit and renders it less active. So keep the body within bounds as much as you can and make room for the spirit.

When I write to you, I expect you to read that—my letters, and my songs, and the poems. But I know you’re not reading, so I hold nothing back. Between sleepless, lonely, and scary nights and sometimes even between the happiest nights. I open your mailbox and write some dumb love letters to the guy I found on the internet and fell in love with. — Arya Kashyap

Thanks to suffering and madness, I have had a finer, richer life than any of you, and I wish to go to my death with dignity, as befits the great moment after which all dignity and majesty cease. Let my body be my ark and my death a long floating on the waves of eternity. A nothing amid nothingness. What defense have I against nothingness but this ark in which I have tried to gather everything that was dear to me, people, birds, animals, and plants, everything that I carry in my eye and in my heart, in the triple-decked ark of my body and soul. Like the pharaohs in the majestic peace of their tombs, I wanted to have all those things with me in death, I wanted everything to be as it was before; I wanted the birds to sing for me forever, I wanted to exchange Charon's bark for another, less desolate and less empty; I wanted to ennoble eternity's unconscionable void with the bitter herbs that spring from the heart of man, to ennoble the soundless emptiness of eternity with the cry of the cuckoo and the song of the lark. All I have done is to develop that bitter poetic metaphor, carry it with passionate logic to its ultimate consequence, which transforms sleep into waking (and the converse); lucidity into madness (and the converse); life into death, as though there were no borderline, and the converse; death into eternity, as if they were not one and the same thing. Thus my egoism is only the egoism of human existence, the egoism of life, counterweight to the egoism of death, and, appearances to the contrary, my consciousness resists nothingness with an egoism that has no equal, resists the outrage of death with the passionate metaphor of the wish to reunite the few people and the bit of love that made up my life. I have wanted and still want to depart this life with specimens of people, flora and fauna, to lodge them all in my heart as in an ark, to shut them up behind my eyelids when they close for the last time. I wanted to smuggle this pure abstraction into nothingness, to sneak it across the threshold of that other abstraction, so crushing in its immensity: the threshold of nothingness. I have therefore tried to condense this abstraction, to condense it by force of will, faith, intelligence, madness, and love (self-love), to condense it so drastically that its specific weight will be such as to life it like a balloon and carry it beyond the reach of darkness and oblivion. If nothing else survives, perhaps my material herbarium or my notes or my letters will live on, and what are they but condensed, materialized idea; materialized life: a paltry, pathetic human victory over immense, eternal, divine nothingness. Or perhaps--if all else is drowned in the great flood--my madness and my dream will remain like a northern light and a distant echo. Perhaps someone will see that light or hear that distant echo, the shadow of a sound that was once, and will grasp the meaning of that light, that echo. Perhaps it will be my son who will someday publish my notes and my herbarium of Pannonian plants (unfinished and incomplete, like all things human). But anything that survives death is a paltry, pathetic victory over the eternity of nothingness--a proof of man's greatness and Yahweh's mercy. Non omnis moriar.

Artoo, I'm switching back to regular handwriting. Calligraphy is hard, and I didn't bring my good pens. Or I need more practice. Right now you're sitting across from me, probably writing HAGS 30 times in a row. I know a little bit of a lot of languages, but even so, I struggle to put this into words. Okay. I'm just going to do it. First of all, I need you to know I'm not putting this out there with any hope of reciprocation. This is something I have to get off my chest (cliché, sorry) before we go our separate ways (cliché). It's the last day of school, and therefore my last chance. "Crush" is too weak a word to describe how I feel. It doesn't do you justice, but maybe it works for me. I am the one who is crushed. I'm crushed that we have only ever regarded each other as enemies. I"m crushed when the day ends and I haven't said anything to you that isn't cloaked in five layers of sarcasm. I'm crushed, concluding this year without having known that you like melancholy music or eat cream cheese straight from the tub in the middle of the night or play with your bangs when you're nervous, as though you're worried they look bad. (They never do.) You're ambitious, clever, interesting, and beautiful. I put "beautiful" last because for some reason, I have a feeling you'd roll your eyes if I wrote it first. But you are. You're beautiful and adorable and so fucking charming. And you have this energy that radiates off you, a shimmering optimism I wish I could borrow for myself sometimes. You're looking at me like you can't believe I'm not done yet, so let me wrap this up before I turn it into a five-paragraph essay. But if it were an essay, here's the thesis statement. I am in love with you, Rowan Roth Please don't make too much fun of me at graduation? Yours, Neil P. McNair

It didn’t talk about pretty lights, love, or shiny stars, but when he called me kid, it felt like somebody grabbed my hand and pulled me out of my OCD cycle. It was soothing, it was freedom. It was so weird. I felt like I had known him for years. I had become so weak from the inside that even the slightest word of comfort blew this intense emotion in me. — Arya Kashyap

It’s weird to be twenty-seven and still be believing in fairytales, but it feels normal. I don’t think I’ll be comfortable thinking through love, planning on it, and calculating the probability. That doesn’t mean I will not ugly up my house with practical things, or I won’t fight over laundry. I just think it’s such a strange thing for me to be in love with half my heart and all my brain. I don’t want a dull and practical love life, much less a marriage.

Until now, I haven’t had the best luck with Siddhartha. But every day before today, I was jealous of his girlfriends. I wondered if he would ever think of the girl who found him on the internet and wrote a book about it. Every day before today, I used to look at the bittersweet letters that he never read. And today, when I look back at that time, it feels nice. The guy who was just a daydream. Today he hugged me, and I have a Polaroid of us. It might be his worst, but it’s my storybook New Year’s Eve. — Arya Kashyap

I believe that there lives a burning desire in the most sequestered private heart of every American, a desire to belong to a great country. I believe that every citizen wants to stand on the world stage and represent a noble country where the mighty do not always crush the weak and the dream of a democracy is not the sole possession of the strong. We must hear the questions raised by Fannie Lou Hamer forty years ago. Every American everywhere asks herself, himself, these questions Hamer asked: What do I think of my country? What is there, which elevates my shoulders and stirs my blood when I hear the words, the United States of America: Do I praise my country enough? Do I laud my fellow citizens enough? What is there about my country that makes me hang my head and avert my eyes when I hear the words the United States of America, and what am I doing about it? Am I relating my disappointment to my leaders and to my fellow citizens, or am I like someone not involved, sitting high and looking low? As Americans, we should not be afraid to respond.

I whirled round, and there on one of those dry gravel beds, was the biggest snake I had ever seen. He was sunning himself, after the cold night, and he must have been asleep when Antonia screamed. When I turned, he was lying in long loose waves, like a letter "W." He twitched and began to coil slowly. He was not merely a big snake, I thought-he was a circus monstrosity. His abominable muscularity, his loathsome, fluid motion, somehow made me sick. He was as thick as my leg, and looked as if millstones couldn't crush the disgusting vitality out of him.

After generations of separations and decades of forgetfulness, the mention of the South brings back to our memories ancient years of pain and pleasure. At the turn of the twentieth century, many African Americans left the Southern towns, left the crushing prejudice and prohibition, and moved north to Chicago and New York City, west to Los Angeles and San Diego. They were drawn by the heady promise of better lives, of equality, fair play, and good old American four-star freedom. Their expectations were at once fulfilled and at the same time dashed to the ground and broken into shards of disappointment. The sense of fulfillment arose from the fact that there were chances to exchange the dull drudgery of sharecrop farming for protected work under unionized agreements. Sadly for the last thirty years, those jobs have been decreasing as industry became computerized and work was sent to foreign countries. The climate which the immigrants imagined as free of racial prejudice was found to be discriminatory in ways different from the Southern modes and possibly even more humiliating. A small percentage of highly skilled and fully educated blacks found and clung to rungs on the success ladder. Unskilled and undereducated black workers were spit out by the system like so many undigestible watermelon seeds. They began to find their lives minimalized, and their selves as persons trivialized. Many members of that early band of twentieth-century pilgrims must have yearned for the honesty of Southern landscapes where even if they were the targets of hate mongers who wanted them dead, they were at least credited with being alive. Northern whites with their public smiles of liberal acceptance and their private behavior of utter rejection wearied and angered the immigrants.

Gacela of Unexpected Love" No one understood the perfume of the shadow magnolia of your belly. No one knew you crushed completely a humming-bird of love between your teeth. There slept a thousand little persian horses in the moonlight plaza of your forehead, while, for four nights, I embraced there your waist, the enemy of snowfall. Between the plaster and the jasmines, your gaze was a pale branch, seeding. I tried to give you, in my breastbone, the ivory letters that say ever. Ever, ever: garden of my torture, your body, flies from me forever, the blood of your veins is in my mouth now, already light-free for my death.

Because it wasn’t okay and never will be. We will power through it; I will continue to power through it – all the stagnant, soul crushing grief – but it will never be okay that my mum is not here. That she will not be at my high school graduation; that she will never give me the lecture, and I won’t be able to play along and pretend to be embarrassed and say, come on, mum; that she will not be there when I open my college acceptance letters (or rejections); that she will never see who I grow up to be – that great mystery of who I am and who I am meant to be – finally asked and answered. I will march forth into the great unknown alone.

October first it was, fifteen past eight. For twenty minutes my heart was ringing, my soul was singing. Because he was typing on the other side. Just the hi, and hahaha. Silly, meaningless conversation, he didn’t even remember. That was my happiest twenty minutes. I stepped out of my house, got a haircut, I thought he’d like. After three days when my face was fine, I scrolled through his page, looked for the things he liked. Then I made a list of things to do, French class, swimming class, aerobics, and a road trip on November nineteen. On October first, fifteen past eight. My heart was ringing, my soul was singing because he wasn’t just typing on the other side. He was writing on my heart with a permanent marker, in pink.

After two weeks came the first letter from Alexander. Tatiasha, Can there be anything harder than this? Missing you is a physical aching that grips me early in the morning and does not leave me, not even as I draw my last waking breath. My solace in these waning empty summer days is the knowledge that you’re safe, and alive, and healthy, and that the worst that you have to go through is serfdom for four well-meaning old women. The wood piles I’ve left are the lightest in the front. The heaviest ones are for the winter. Use them last, and if you need help carrying them, God help me, ask Vova. Don’t hurt yourself. And don’t fill the water pails all the way to the top. They’re too heavy. Getting back was rough, and as soon as I came back, I was sent right out to the Neva, where for six days we planned our attack and then made a move in boats across the river and were completely crushed in two hours. We didn’t stand a chance. The Germans bombed the boats with the Vanyushas, their version of my rocket launcher, the boats all sank. We were left with a thousand fewer men and were no closer to crossing the river. We’re now looking at other places we can cross. I’m fine, except for the fact that it’s rained here for ten days straight and I’ve been hip deep in mud for all that time. There is nowhere to sleep, except in the mud. We put our trench coats down and hope it stops raining soon. All black and wet, I almost felt sorry for myself until I thought of you during the blockade. I’ve decided to do that from now on. Every time I think I have it so tough, I’m going to think of you burying your sister in Lake Ladoga. I wish you had been given a lighter cross than Leningrad to carry through your life. Things are going to be relatively quiet here for the next few weeks, until we regroup. Yesterday a bomb fell in the commandant’s bunker. The commandant wasn’t there at the time. Yet the anxiety doesn’t go away. When is it going to come again? I play cards and soccer. And I smoke. And I think of you. I sent you money. Go to Molotov at the end of August. Don’t forget to eat well, my warm bun, my midnight sun, and kiss your hand for me, right in the palm and then press it against your heart. Alexander Tatiana read Alexander’s letter a hundred times, memorizing every word. She slept with her face on the letter, which renewed her strength.

We were examining a big hole with two entrances. The burrow sloped into the ground at a gentle angle, so that we could see where the two corridors united, and the floor was dusty from use, like a little highway over which much travel went. I was walking backward, in a crouching position, when I heard Antonia scream. She was standing opposite me, pointing behind me and shouting something in Bohemian. I whirled around, and there, on one of those dry gravel beds, was the biggest snake I had ever seen. He was sunning himself, after the cold night, and he must have been asleep when Antonia screamed. When I turned, he was lying in loose waves, like a letter "W". He twitched and began to coil slowly. He was not merely a big snake, I thought - he was a circus monstrosity. His abominable muscularity, his loathsome, fluid motion, somehow made me sick. He was as thick as my leg, and looked as if millstones couldn't crush the disgusting vitality out of him. He lifted his hideous little head , and rattled. I didn't run because I didn't think of it - if my back had been against a stone wall I couldn't have felt more cornered. I saw his coils tighten - now he would spring, spring his length, I remembered. I ran up and drove at his head with my spade, struck him fairly across the neck, and in a minute he was all about my feet in wavy loops. I struck now from hate. Antonia, barefooted as she was, ran up behind me. Even after I had pounded his ugly head flat, his body kept on coiling and winding, doubling and falling back on itself. I walked away and turned my back. I felt seasick.

In The Shawshank Redemption, there's a short scene between Andy and Red that reveals the difference in their points of view. After almost twenty years in Shawshank Prison, Red is cynical because, in his eyes, the concept of hope is simply a four-letter word. His spirit has been so crushed by the prison system that he angrily declares to Andy, 'Hope is a dangerous thing. Drives a man insane. It's got no place here. Better get used to the idea.' And it is Red's emotional journey that leads him to the understanding that 'hope is a good thing.' The film ends on a note of hope, with Red breaking his parole and riding the bus to meet Andy in Mexico: 'I hope I can make it across the border. I hope to see my friend and shake his hand. I hope the Pacific is as blue as it has been in my dreams. I hope.

As the steak sizzled, she removed an envelope from her apron pocket. “While that’s cooking, I wanted to share with you all a letter I received from Nanette Harrison in Long Beach. Nanette writes, ‘Dear Mrs. Zott, I’m a vegetarian. It’s not for religious reasons—it’s just that I don’t think it’s very nice to eat living things. My husband says the body needs meat and I’m being stupid, but I just hate thinking an animal has given up its life for me. Jesus did that and look what happened to him. Sincerely yours, Mrs. Nanette Harrison, Long Beach, California.’ “Nanette, you’ve brought up an interesting point,” Elizabeth said. “What we eat has consequences for other living things. However, plants are living things too, and yet we rarely consider that they are still alive even as we chop them to bits, crush them with our molars, force them down our esophagi, and then digest them in our stomachs filled with hydrochloric acid. In short, I applaud you, Nanette. You think before you eat. But make no mistake, you’re still actively taking life to sustain your own. There is no way around this. As for Jesus, no comment.

—and I say you still haven't answered my question, Father Bleu." "Haven't I, dear lady? I thought I stated that death is merely the beginning of—" "No, no, no!" Her voice was as high as a harpy's. "Don't go all gooey and metaphysical. I mean to ask, what is death the act, the situation, the moment?" She watched him foxily. The priest in turn struggled to remain polite. "Madame, I'm not positive I follow." "Let me say it another way. Most people are afraid of dying, yes?" "I disagree. Not those who find mystical union with the body of Christ in—" "Oh, come off it!" Madame Kagle shrilled. "People are frightened of it, Father Bleu. Frightened and screaming their fear silently every hour of every day they live. Now I put it to you. Of what are they afraid? Are they afraid of the end of consciousness? The ultimate blackout, so to speak? Or are they afraid of another aspect of death? The one which they can't begin to foresee or understand?" "What aspect is that, Madame Kagle?" "The pain." She glared. "The pain, Father. Possibly sudden. Possibly horrible. Waiting, always waiting somewhere ahead, at an unguessable junction of time and place. Like that bootboy tonight. How it must have hurt. One blinding instant when his head hit, eh? I suggest, Father Bleu, that is what we're afraid of, that is the wholly unknowable part of dying—the screaming, hurting how, of which the when is only a lesser part. The how is the part we never know. Unless we experience it." She slurped champagne in the silence. She eyed him defiantly. "Well, Father? What have you got to say?" Discreetly Father Bleu coughed into his closed fist. "Theologically, Madame, I find the attempt to separate the mystical act of dying into neat little compartments rather a matter of hairsplitting. And furthermore—" "If that's how you feel," she interrupted, "you're just not thinking it out." "My good woman!" said Father Bleu gently. "Pay attention to me!" Madame Wanda Kagle glared furiously. "I say you pay attention! Because you have never stopped to think about it, have you? If death resembles going to sleep, why, that's an idea your mind can get hold of, isn't it? You may be afraid of it, yes. Afraid of the end of everything. But at least you can get hold of some notion of something of what it's like. Sleep. But can you get hold of anything of what it must feel like to experience the most agonizing of deaths? Your head popping open like that bootboy's tonight, say? A thousand worms of pain inside every part of you for a second long as eternity? Can you grasp that? No, you can't, Father Bleu. And that's what death is at it's worst—the unknown, the possibly harrowing pain ahead." She clamped her lips together smugly. She held out her champagne glass for a refill. A woman in furs clapped a hand over her fashionably green lips and rushed from the group. Though puzzled, Joy was still all eyes and ears. "Even your blessed St. Paul bears me out, Father." The priest glanced up, startled. "What?" "The first letter to the Corinthians, if I remember. The grave has a victory, all right. But it's death that has the sting." In the pause the furnace door behind her eyes opened wide, and hell shone out. "I know what I'm talking about, Father. I've been there." Slowly she closed her fingers, crushing the champagne glass in her hand. Weeping, blood drooling from her palm down her frail veined arms, she had to be carried out. The party broke up at once.

It was an innocent crush. It was innocent because you said you weren’t seeing anyone, And I wasn’t the kinda girl who’d love someone that belonged to some other person. I was still writing a thousand texts, swallowing all my pride, I was making up a million dreams over just a glass of wine. Then I cried the whole night, Because I was writing to someone else’s guy. With the radio on, I was writing you over two hundred letters, Even when you added my name to your long list of stalkers. My friends were shouting, ‘save yourself and run,’ But I was fine because you said you weren’t seeing anyone. I wasn’t the kinda girl who’d love someone that belonged to some other person, But I did, and I did because you said you weren’t seeing anyone. On a Sunday morning, I saw your picture with her, You had your arms around, and she was covered in fur. Then I cried the whole night, Because I was in love with someone else’s guy. Now nothing is the same, your eyes or your smile, Because I’m not the kinda girl who’d want someone else’s life. Now it’ll haunt me forever, and I’ll always be mortified, It won’t be the same because you’ll always be the guy who lied. Maybe that will be our song. And believe me, I never thought we’d have a sad song.

As the steak sizzled, she removed an envelope from her apron pocket. “While that’s cooking, I wanted to share with you all a letter I received from Nanette Harrison in Long Beach. Nanette writes, ‘Dear Mrs. Zott, I’m a vegetarian. It’s not for religious reasons—it’s just that I don’t think it’s very nice to eat living things. My husband says the body needs meat and I’m being stupid, but I just hate thinking an animal has given up its life for me. Jesus did that and look what happened to him. Sincerely yours, Mrs. Nanette Harrison, Long Beach, California.’ “Nanette, you’ve brought up an interesting point,” Elizabeth said. “What we eat has consequences for other living things. However, plants are living things too, and yet we rarely consider that they are still alive even as we chop them to bits, crush them with our molars, force them down our esophagi, and then digest them in our stomachs filled with hydrochloric acid. In short, I applaud you, Nanette. You think before you eat. But make no mistake, you’re still actively taking life to sustain your own. There is no way around this. As for Jesus, no comment.” She turned and, jabbing the steak out of the pan, the dripping juices a bloody red, looked directly into the camera. “And now a word from our sponsor.

lay there fresh and raw from having been carved open to bring her granddaughter into the world—the past ran me down. I had a vision like the kind people describe when they’re near death. For one brief second, it was as if a curtain had been lifted. I saw a long line of people, faceless in the distance, familiar as they got closer: my great-grandparents, my grandparents, my parents. I was at the front of this row of human dominoes, my infant in my arms, and as my forefathers and -mothers toppled behind me, they pushed the next generation into motion. There was no escape; their collective weight would crush me and my baby. I had started out as an egg inside Malabar, just as she had begun as an egg inside Vivian, and so on, each of our fates charted from the depths of our mothers. What little I knew about my grandparents and great-grandparents had been constructed around a sturdy fact or two, embellished perhaps by a shy smile in a grainy photograph or an underlined sentence in a book or letter. The specifics of their lives would remain unknown to me, as mine would be to the baby I held. But our collective history would shape my daughter, and there was something noxious in our matrilineal line. Malabar was the only mother I had, but she was not the mother I wanted to be. Here was my choice: I could continue down the well-trod path upon which I’d been running for so very long and pass along this inheritance like a baton, as blithely as I did my light hair and fair skin. My daughter could do her best to outrun it. She would grow up to be beautiful and smart and agile, as I used to be, as her grandparents were, as her great-grandparents were before them. Or I could slow down, catch my breath, and look mindfully for a new path. There had to be another way and I owed it to my daughter to find it.

Life is strewn with these miracles, for which people who are in love can always hope. It is possible that this one had been artificially brought about by my mother who, seeing that for some time past I had lost all interest in life, may have suggested to Gilberte to write to me, just as, when I was little and went first to the sea-side, so as to give me some pleasure in bathing, which I detested because it took away my breath, she used secretly to hand to the man who was to ‘dip’ me marvellous boxes made of shells, and branches of coral, which I believed that I myself had discovered lying at the bottom of the sea. However, with every occurrence which, in our life and among its contrasted situations, bears any relation to love, it is best to make no attempt to understand it, since in so far as these are inexorable, as they are unlooked-for, they appear to be governed by magic rather than by rational laws. When a multi-millionaire—who for all his millions is quite a charming person—sent packing by a poor and unattractive woman with whom he has been living, calls to his aid, in his desperation, all the resources of wealth, and brings every worldly influence to bear without succeeding in making her take him back, it is wiser for him, in the face of the implacable obstinacy of his mistress, to suppose that Fate intends to crush him, and to make him die of an affection of the heart, than to seek any logical explanation. These obstacles, against which lovers have to contend, and which their imagination, over-excited by suffering, seeks in vain to analyse, are contained, as often as not, in some peculiar characteristic of the woman whom they cannot bring back to themselves, in her stupidity, in the influence acquired over her, the fears suggested to her by people whom the lover does not know, in the kind of pleasures which, at the moment, she is demanding of life, pleasures which neither her lover nor her lover’s wealth can procure for her. In any event, the lover is scarcely in a position to discover the nature of these obstacles, which her woman’y cunning hides from him and his own judgment, falsified by love, prevents him from estimating exactly. They may be compared with those tumours which the doctor succeeds in reducing, but without having traced them to their source. Like them these obstacles remain mysterious but are temporary. Only they last, as a rule, longer than love itself. And as that is not a disinterested passion, the lover who is no longer in love does not seek to know why the woman, neither rich nor virtuous, with whom he was in love refused obstinately for years to let him continue to keep her. Now the same mystery which often veils from our eyes the reason for a catastrophe, when love is in question, envelops just as frequently the suddenness of certain happy solutions, such as had come to me with Gilberte’s letter. Happy, or at least seemingly happy, for there are few solutions that can really be happy when we are dealing with a sentiment of such a kind that every satisfaction which we can bring to it does no more, as a rule, than dislodge some pain. And yet sometimes a respite is granted us, and we have for a little while the illusion that we are healed.

I’m at my locker; the door is jammed, and I’m trying to yank it open. I finally get the door loose and there’s Josh, standing right there. “Lara Jean…” He has this shell-shocked, confused expression on his face. “I’ve been trying to talk to you since last night. I came by, and nobody could find you…” He holds out my letter. “I don’t understand. What is this?” “I don’t know…,” I hear myself say. My voice feels far away. It’s like I’m floating above myself, watching it all unfold. “I mean, it’s from you, right?” “Oh, wow.” I take a deep breath and accept the letter. I fight the urge to tear it up. “Where did you even get this?” “It got sent to me in the mail.” Josh jams his hands into his pockets. “When did you write this?” “Like, a long time ago,” I say. I let out a fake little laugh. “I don’t even remember when. It might have been middle school.” Good job, Lara Jean. Keep it up. Slowly he says, “Right…but you mention going to the movies with Margot and Mike and Ben that time. That was a couple of years ago.” I bite my bottom lip. “Right. I mean, it was kind of a long time ago. In the grand scheme of things.” I can feel tears coming on so close that if I break concentration even for a second, if I waver, I will cry and that will make everything worse, if such a thing is possible. I must be cool and breezy and nonchalant now. Tears would ruin that. Josh is staring at me so hard I have to look away. “So then…Do you…or did you have feelings for me or…?” “I mean, yes, sure, I did have a crush on you at one point, before you and Margot ever started dating. A million years ago.” “Why didn’t you ever say anything? Because, Lara Jean…God. I don’t know.” His eyes are on me, and they’re confused, but there’s something else, too. “This is crazy. I feel kind of blindsided.” The way he’s looking at me now, I’m suddenly in a time warp back to a summer day when I was fourteen and he was fifteen, and we were walking home from somewhere. He was looking at me so intently I was sure he was going to try to kiss me. I got nervous, so I picked a fight with him and he never looked at me like that again. Until this moment. Don’t. Just please, don’t. Whatever he’s thinking, whatever he wants to say, I don’t want to hear it. I will do anything, literally anything, not to hear it. Before he can, I say, “I’m dating someone.” Josh’s jaw goes slack. “What?” What? “Yup. I’m dating someone, someone I really really like, so please don’t worry about this.” I wave the letter like it’s just paper, trash, like once upon a time I didn’t literally pour my heart onto this page. I stuff it into my bag. “I was really confused when I wrote this; I don’t even know how it got sent out. Honestly, it’s not worth talking about. So please, please don’t say anything to Margot about it.” He nods, but that’s not good enough. I need a verbal commitment. I need to hear the words come out of his mouth. So I add, “Do you swear? On your life?” If Margot was to ever find out…I would want to die. “All right, I swear. I mean, we haven’t even spoken since she left.” I let out a huge breath. “Great. Thanks.” I’m about to walk away, but then Josh stops me. “Who’s the guy?” “What guy?” “The guy you’re dating.” That’s when I see him. Peter Kavinsky, walking down the hallway. Like magic. Beautiful, dark-haired Peter. He deserves background music, he looks so good. “Peter. Kavinsky. Peter Kavinsky!

was quite surprised to discover that it was a possible prophecy of 9/11, eight years in advance. Here are the key lyrics: “Ram your face against my fist. Burn, feel, comprehend where we stand. Metal to metal, soul to soul, meshing to fusion. Scraping our sanity. Again you attempt manipulation. Failing to maintain utter control, crushed in defeat, you try to reach me with pathetic threats that would beckon my fate. The reason I fear you is I cling to the past.” This may not sound that convincing at first, but the name of our band was only one letter off from Shanksville, a small town in Pennsylvania where a hijacked airliner crashed on 9/11. The world was going to go into a “Shanksville delirium,” and the planes would ram into the towers, causing metal to touch metal, soul to touch soul, meshing to fusion and burning

p. 68, ch. 10 "THAT is why our arts and sciences cannot improve the world, despite what liberal philanthropists say. Our vast new scientific skills are first used by the damnably selfish impatient parts of our nature and nation, the careful kinfly social part always comes second." p.112, ch. 14 "He called it freedom, for that makes men feel to blame for what they do. Men hate that feeling, so want it crushed and killed. I am no man" p. 256 "A letter..." ""Of my mother I have only this to say: she was unselfish and hard-working, and taught me how useless these virtues are when separated from courage and intelligence.

I haven’t even checked to see if my Heart-2-Heart pal wrote back.” Madison plucked at the fuzzy strands of yarn on her pillow. “You should. I love this program! We can tell each other anything. It’s so great!” “And this guy’s name is Blue?” Piper’s voice sounded doubtful. “I don’t remember any kid at school named Blue. There was that one guy we called Green in our chem lab, remember? But I think we called him that because his last name was Green and we could never remember his first name.” Madison giggled even more. She was feeling like a fizzy soda pop, bubbly all over. “Oh, Piper, his name isn’t really Blue. That’s just his nickname.” “Do you have a nickname?” “Of course,” Madison said. “But I don’t want to tell you what it is. You’ll think it’s ridiculous.” “I can’t believe you won’t tell me,” Piper protested. “I’m your BFF. We share everything!” “I know…”” “Come on, tell me!” Piper pleaded. “Look, I told you about the time I wet my pants in second grade, and that I had a total crush on Mr. Proctor, our fifth-grade teacher. And last year, when I--” “This is different, Piper,” Madison tried to explain. “We can tell our deepest secrets to our Heart-2-Heart pal because they don’t know who we are.” “I just can’t believe this,” Piper continued in a really hurt voice. “Didn’t I tell you about that D I almost got in Algebra I and the secret tutor I had to hire to bring up my grade? God, I even told you about that mole on my butt that I had to have removed. If that’s not a deep secret, I don’t know what is.” “Okay, okay!” Madison sat up. “I’ll tell you. It’s Pinky.” There was a long pause. “Pinky? That’s ridiculous.” “See?” Madison shouted into the phone. “I knew you’d say that.” She got up and crossed to her vanity mirror. She tousled her hair with one hand to make it stand up. “It had to do with dyeing my hair pink.” There was an even longer pause. “You’re not going to do that, are you?” Piper asked quietly. “Because I don’t think it will help the campaign. Oh, it might steal a few votes from Jeremy--but do we really need them? I’m not sure.” “Piper, relax,” Madison said. “I was just joking about doing it.

That also may have had something to do with it,” Jeremy said, scratching his head. “He liked you, too.” “Too?” Madison repeated, cocking her head. Jeremy flashed an embarrassed smile. “Well, at the time, I had a major crush on you. I thought it was pretty obvious.” Madison’s heart skipped a tiny beat. Maybe all wasn’t lost after all. “You did?” He shoved his hands in his pockets and rocked back on his heels. “That’s why I didn’t apologize right away. I just couldn’t face you. And later, when people like the Stafford twins and Piper Chang turned on me and started calling me names, I figured there was no way I could get anyone to believe my side of the story. You and everyone else seemed to have made up your minds.” Madison winced. “We convicted you without a trial,” she said, repeating the words Kirk Boyd had said before. Ruby chose that moment to lick Madison in the face, which made Madison burst into giggles instead of tears. “It’s funny how things work out,” she said, wrapping her arms around the dog and squeezing her tight. “All this time we spent hating each other when we could have spent it--” “Together.” Jeremy kneeled beside the dog and looked directly at Madison.

It had to be infatuation, right? Who wouldn’t crush on this man a little? That’s all it was, because there was no way in the world I was falling for Beckett. Absolutely none. He turned and high-fived Maisie, that little strip of white on his wrist screaming louder than my brain could deny. Because while my head had been panicked Saturday night, focused on forms and doctors and transfers, my heart had declared that this man was trusted. My heart had signed that paper while my head was consumed with other matters. This man was in my life, and in a way, mine. And Colt’s. And most definitely Maisie’s. After all, that bracelet had her name written on it. Oh God. I was in love with him.

At that moment, I was one hundred percent captivated by him. My go-to instinct to be aloof and unattached went out of the window because I was so overwhelmingly fascinated by him. I always kept things under control, but Siddhartha made me behave in a way I never did before. Everything I wrote after that made little to absolutely no sense, because after that moment, I fancied him, and that feeling scared me. 

Everybody said he’d break my heart, and I knew that too. But only young can risk. It could have been worse. I could have been forty, he could have been married. But we were twenty four, and that was Valentine. I sent another text, five hundred and ninth. Because he lied, he said he was single that time. And since I was twenty four, I risked it all. I fell in love with the guy, who got the most adorable smile. I gave him all of my heart and he didn’t even give me a reply.

And since I was twenty four, I risked it all. I fell in love with the guy, who got the most adorable smile. I gave him all of my heart and he didn’t even give me a reply.

And just like that, without a goodbye, the sweet breeze sweeps him away. I fall off my cloud again.

All this happened by chance, and it all happened in my head. But you broke my heart just like that. You’re a liar, you said you were single. You didn’t stop me from dreaming. Not once. Our song is not your song. Our story is not your story. I am writing this story alone, I am writing our song alone.

Sometimes things are a million times prettier to you in your head. Maybe that’s how Siddhartha actually is—very beautiful. But I’m afraid, together, we don’t look as beautiful as we appear to me, in my head.

I wonder if I should really expose that much of myself to Siddhartha. Should I let him hear my shaky voice, emboldened by any word he says? Should I let him see the way my face lights up when he smiles so generously. Maybe if I let him see me, he’ll let me see him too. Or maybe I’ll make a huge fool of myself. Far worse, I’ll disappoint myself and everyone related to me. Again.

I always thought, we’d have our story. It would go like, once upon a time, I saw a guy with the most adorable smile. After letters, and songs, and sketches, he became the highlight of my day. He wouldn’t even look at me at first, but after he had his shares of heart breaks, risks, and reckless love. He called me. We fell in love. We laughed. We travelled. We remodeled our house. We bought grocery together. He called me sweetheart and turned my whole world upside down.

There’s a little hustle in my heart, maybe, it’s not random. Maybe Siddhartha and I are gonna happen. Maybe it’s not nothing. Maybe the universe has a plan. But maybe not.

Expect your love life, your career, your family relationships, your physical body, your money, your friendships, your spiritual path, and your sense of well-being to be utterly transformed. Expect your potential to be unleashed. Expect yourself to taste ecstasy every day. Expect flow states to become your new normal. Expect elevated emotions to course through your heart while inspired thoughts flood your mind. Expect adversity to strengthen rather than crush you. Expect your days to begin and end with bliss. Expect to be a happy person. Expect to do things you never believed possible. My eyes are full of tears as I write this, my love letter to you. I have poured my heart, mind, and soul into writing this book, with the goal of inspiring you to claim your full potential. Now it’s your turn. It’s time to put this all into practice as you create an extraordinary life for yourself. I’ll see you on the journey.

People stumble upon things they want to stumble upon. I find Siddhartha now and then. In the past, I often stumbled upon his pictures and videos because I wanted to. I’ve always been afraid of giving up on the hope that one day Siddhartha will find me. Because then he might never. The only thing that makes my life worth living is the likelihood of having my dreams come true.

Everything is still close to my heart, all the love, all the people, all the places, and this city. Memories feed me. Without them, I feel my soul will dry up, and I’ll be lost.

I just wanted to remember you like the guy who called me kid and saved my life. — Arya Kashyap

Twenty years from now, when I’ll become super-successful, very hot old man in an on-point outfit, being chauffeured in a limo. And you’ll be wrinkly and fat and poor after losing all your money in shopping and charity. You’ll still be unbelievably out of my league… just like you were in the past. And just like you’re today. — Siddhartha Aggarwal

I don’t know how long I sit there, tears trickling quietly down my cheeks, gazing at the deep blue sky. My friend Riti says, whatever we manifest from the moon, star, water, and nature, the universe conspires to make that wish come true. Now when I’m in the core of nature, sitting under the moon, watching two trails of silver light streak through the stars, my feet hanging in the river, I close my eye and wish just this. Because right now, this is everything. He is everything. I don’t want this to be bad, and I don’t want this to be nothing. I want this to last forever. I want us to last forever. 

I can give away my whole loveless life for this one moment. Pure like a child and fresh like spring. There’s no better way to love than this. To love foolishly. To love in the moment, with everything you have. Everyone who came before, all the heartbreak and the love before falling in love with him, the recklessness of this moment has made them all meaningless.

years, and our friendship went well beyond us being workplace acquaintances. Judging by the look on his face now, I knew I was in for a conversation that had nothing to do with work. Jagger made himself comfortable in the chair opposite of where I was seated and asked, “So, are you ever going to share?” “Share what?” I retorted, knowing precisely what he was referring to. Jagger had been walking out of Harper Security Ops with me the day Sawyer showed up. I hadn’t ever shared the full story with him—or anyone else, for that matter—about what happened between us. Quite frankly, I wasn’t quite sure what I would have said. Telling someone that a girl I’d crushed on had left town without telling me seemed silly. “You know exactly what I’m talking about,” Jagger replied. “Who was the girl in the parking lot the other day?” “Her name is Sawyer,” I answered. “And is there a reason that both you and Sawyer seemed unable to tear your eyes away from one another?” he pressed. I recalled that moment in the parking lot. The instant my eyes were on her, I couldn’t look away. That might have been because I was terrified I was making her up in my head and that she’d disappear if I even blinked. “The last time we saw each other was twelve years ago,” I shared, hoping that would answer all his questions. His lips twitched before he declared, “So, she’s the girl.” “What girl?” “Don’t play that game with me, Jesse,” he ordered. “She’s the girl that’s had you all twisted up inside for years.” There was no use in denying it, so I nodded. The truth was, there was so much I’d found attractive about Sawyer. It wasn’t just that she was pretty and had an unbelievable body. I loved her courage. I liked the fact that she was willing to give just about anything a try. She didn’t live her life in fear, and she was the kind of girl who went after what she wanted. There was so much determination in her personality, and for me, a girl like Sawyer was a girl that I wanted to be around. And I had believed she had a level of attraction to me as well. I could see it sometimes when she looked at me, and I felt it in every word she wrote in her letters to me while I was a recruit. The words in those letters were some of the best memories I had of her. I hadn’t expected she would write as much as she did, considering we were only friends, and I remembered how good it felt to know that she cared enough to do it. Unfortunately, I didn’t get the chance to turn it into something more, and she was gone before I could make it happen. That was why Jagger knew I’d been twisted up inside for years about a girl, even if he didn’t know it had been her.

What letter?” she heard McKenna ask in a suffocated voice. “The one you had sent to her…asking for money, because you needed to break your apprenticeship and flee from Mr. Ilbery. Mrs. Faircloth read the letter to me…and hearing the words you had written made me realize…that as long as there was a chance that you were in this world, I wanted to go on living in it.” Aline stopped suddenly as her eyes blurred, and she blinked furiously to clear them. McKenna made a hoarse sound. He came to the chair and sank to his haunches before her, breathing as if someone had delivered a crushing blow to the center of his chest. “I never thought you’d come back,” Aline said. “I never wanted you to find out about my accident. But when you returned to Stony Cross, I decided that being close to you—even for one night—was worth any risk. That is why I…” She hesitated, blushing wildly. “The night of the village fair…” Breathing heavily, McKenna reached for the hem of her gown. Swiftly Aline bent to stop him, gripping his wrist in a convulsive movement. “Wait!” McKenna went still, the muscles of his shoulders tightly bunched. “Burn scars are so ugly,” Aline whispered. “They’re all over my legs. The right one is especially bad, where much of the skin was destroyed. The scars tighten and shrink until it’s difficult to straighten my knee sometimes.” He absorbed that for a moment, and then proceeded to pry her fingers from his wrist and remove her slippers, one after the other.

He hardly talks but still I feel he is listening to me He hardly meets but still I feel he is near me He hardly replies to my message but still I feel I read his letter daily He hardly looks at me but still I feel he is watching me He never has touched me but still I feel he is hugging me He has never listened to music with me but still I feel he is singing for Me He never walked with me but still I feel we are dancing with each other He hardly smiled at me but still I feel we are laughing together He hardly has shake hands with me but still I feel he is holding me ! He hardly knows me but still I feel he is my soulmate He hardly accepts anything from me still I feel to gift him everything He hardly wishes me goodnight but still I feel he kissed me good night I don’t even know where he stays but still I feel we are under same roof ! And no matter whatever you do, you can never ever take this feelings from me !

He hardly talks but still I feel he is listening to me He hardly meets but still I feel he is near me He hardly replies to my message but still I feel I read his letter daily He hardly looks at me but still I feel he is watching me He never has touched me but still I feel he is hugging me He has never listened to music with me but still I feel he is singing for Me He never walked with me but still I feel we are dancing with each other He hardly smiled at me but still I feel we are laughing together He hardly has shake hands with me but still I feel he is holding me ! He hardly knows me but still I feel he is my soulmate He hardly accepts anything from me still I feel to gift him everything He hardly wishes me goodnight but still I feel he kissed me good night I don’t even know where he stays but still I feel we are under same roof ! And no matter whatever you do, you can never ever take this feelings from me !

His name. That name I'd heard a thousand times, a thousand ways, and still — even under the shock of the moment — his name crushed my heart, splintering it like broken glass.

Don’t mistake me,” Kalen snarled, his tone dripping with ice. “You aren’t looking at a gentleman. If you attack one of my Alphas or my Sigma, I will strike back. I’ll crush you like a fucking bug, wipe the blood off on my resignation letter, and walk away without a single fucking regret, are we clear?