Libby Lost And Found Quotes

In my favorite books, it’s never quite the ending I want. There’s always a price to be paid. Mom and Libby liked the love stories where everything turned out perfectly, wrapped in a bow, and I’ve always wondered why I gravitate toward something else. I used to think it was because people like me don’t get those endings. And asking for it, hoping for it, is a way to lose something you’ve never even had. The ones that speak to me are those whose final pages admit there is no going back. That every good thing must end. That every bad thing does too, that everything does. That is what I’m looking for every time I flip to the back of a book, compulsively checking for proof that in a life where so many things have gone wrong, there can be beauty too. That there is always hope, no matter what. After losing Mom, those were the endings I found solace in. The ones that said, Yes, you have lost something, but maybe, someday, you’ll find something too. For a decade, I’ve known I will never again have everything, and so all I’ve wanted is to believe that, someday, again, I’ll have enough. The ache won’t always be so bad. People like me aren’t broken beyond repair. No ice ever freezes too thick to thaw and no thorns ever grow too dense to be cut away. This book has crushed me with its weight and dazzled me with its tiny bright spots. Some books you don’t read so much as live, and finishing one of those always makes me think of ascending from a scuba dive. Like if I surface too fast I might get the bends.

Sometimes it's okay to believe and not know why.

It's my favorite word," she says. "Falling" conveys this sense of excitement and danger and feeling out of control. But there's also something so hopeful about it- you can fall in love, for instance. Or into good luck. Or a pile of crisp autumn leaves.

Libby isn't cut out to have children, even fictional ones.

She is insignificant. Unless she has stories in her head, and right now, Libby has none.

Today Libby's mind is a clean glass pitcher ready to fill.

She doesn't know what she would do without Rolf. He is everything she aspires to be; Steady. Friendly. Unworried.

... who know how long she has before her brain turns to mush instead of mushy around the edges?

Dying is hardest on the people watching it happen.

Out of her imagination sprang flesh and bones. More importantly, their story became a place for her to hide.

Everyone has their own shit. Just in different flavors.

... panic attacks happen hours, days, sometimes weeks after her anxiety spikes- a build-up of stress hormones erupting in her brain like a messy baking soda volcano.

Nothing plugs a hole in the head like peanut butter.

...for now at least, the hope that suddenly fills Libby's heart is larger and lighter than the cells that are dying by the thousands inside her brain.

Aren't you the one who writes happy endings? Write one for yourself.

Neither Huperzine nor Benjamin has much of an appetite, and eating the word “hope” isn’t nearly as satisfying as feeling it, but they choke down the spiky letters anyway.

There are two types of people in the world. Those who eat the cookie when it crumbles—and those who choke.

Libby’s thoughts grow wings and beaks in their haste to flap away from her. How did I not know? This isn’t happening. Should I still buy a new toaster? This isn’t happening. I don’t have anyone to tell. This isn’t happening. Dying has always terrified Libby, but she’s expected a bus to come careening wildly around a corner, some forty years from now. She feels betrayed that the process has, in fact, already started. The bus is moving toward her.

Libby has not yet told the Children that she is sick. Or wants to die. She doesn’t want them to think it’s their fault, although surely, they know something is wrong. She has caught them sneaking sideways glances at one another—when she accidentally referred to the Unstopping as the “Unmoving” for an entire chapter, for instance, or forgot Everlee’s allergy to shellfish and had her wolf down a plate of clams. Libby wonders where the Children are and what they overhear when she is at the doctor’s office.

When she looks up again, the neurologist is sitting behind his desk. Libby can tell by his eyes that he’s been there for a while. He takes off his glasses, like doctors do when they have bad news, then says many words. She is surprised none of them are “meningioma.” But one is “dementia.” “Excuse me?” Libby sits forward in her chair. “Could you repeat that?

Dementia,” the doctor says again. “What we call early-onset dementia. You’re the youngest case I’ve seen.

It could take years,” the doctor says, trying to help. But because he only knows Libby as his four-thirty patient, not the real Libby, he doesn’t realize this is the wrong thing to say. She begins crying, sobbing really, curling into a ball on the chair, her knees pinned to her chest. Her sneakers are caked with mud from the run she took this morning with Rolf. Clumps break free and disappear into the thicket of carpet below. This is what will happen to you, Libby thinks. Little by little, you, too, will fall away.

What happens when the seeker finds? When an adoptee or another seeker has identified her long-lost kin, what does she do with that information? No chart or browser extension can answer this question, nor can algorithms predict how the people she’s identified will react to being found. This is when some seekers prowl the Internet, looking for clues into whether they want to know these strangers in all but blood. It is, of course, breathtakingly easy to figure out your father’s career on LinkedIn, his political leanings on Facebook. Social media makes it possible—once you’ve discovered who your father is—to learn what he is.

She hopes they know in their make-believe hearts that she would never abandon them. Not on purpose anyway.

If we only lived in sunshine, we’d get soaked by the sight of storm clouds.

There’s always a ‘lie’ in what we believe, an ‘if’ in life, and an ‘end’ in friends,

Never harm when you can help. Never stop when you can go. Never wrong when you can right.

Libby doesn’t do well under pressure. All that came to mind was rutabaga. “Is that even a vegetable?” Libby asked, spinning the top button of her shirt between her fingers. “It doesn’t matter.” The doctor typed something into his computer. “Keep going.” Hesitation. Then: “Rutabaga?” Libby asked. Today, five weeks later, she will officially be told what is preventing her from recalling green beans and Brussels sprouts on demand. But because she does not like waiting—not for food in restaurants, not to “get to know” people, and definitely not for the endings of books, even her own—she has googled her symptoms and deduced the problem herself. She is sure she has a rubbery tumor called a meningioma lurking in her brain.