Adi Alsaid

“All the recognizable cliques came by, and so did those un-groupable stragglers who were known by their little circles of two or three.”

“A native tongue, in my opinion, isn't the language spoken where you were born or the first language you learned; it's a language that makes you feel at home. It's a language that you don't command, but that commands you. And without it, you'd feel lost, unsure of how to express to the world everything you care enough to express.”

“What if she was supposed to be a painter, but no one ever gave her a brush?”

“People go entire lives without figuring out exactly what they want from life. You already have it, and the future you and your dad have planned out for you in going to take it away from you.”

“As long as we don't get turned into something that looks more like high school, more like everybody else and less like us, I'll be okay.”

“Panic strikes me when I think about a sentence that isn’t given the chance to live because I don’t have a pen in my hand or am not sitting near enough to someone familiar to speak it to. Especially if it’s a particularly good sentence, a sentence with truth or beauty or humor or sadness to it. The best ones always take you by surprise. They sneak into your head while you’re walking down the aisles at a supermarket, or flat-out assault you when you’re at your grandmother’s funeral, and you have to scramble to give the thought life before it’s gone forever. Cocktail napkins, palms, text messages sent to yourself.”

“Human beings are more or less formulas. Pun intended. We are not any one thing that is mathematically provable. We are more or less than we are anything. We are more or less kind, or more or less not. More or less selfish, happy, wise, lonely.”

“I'm usually a bit awkward in houses that I haven't been to before, so it's a way to not look weird. If I find something I've read before it automatically makes me more comfortable.”

“No sky Leila had seen before could compare to the beauty she was seeing above her. It didn't feel like some accident of nature but rather something that was purposefully unleashed on the world.”

“It was time to let go of the mad desire to remember. It was time to start living whatever life would come. In the present, not the past.”

“Funny, how it took a little bit of pain to remember that certain parts of yourself were alive.”

“What's so great about writing?" "You can make anything true”

“I keep expecting to bump into you two on the road, but maybe the universe isn’t yet ready to handle you and me side by side again.”

“How do text messages make you feel existential?I start thinking about exactly that: how people can edit a thought before sending it out to the world. They can make themselves seem more well spoken than they are, or funnier, smarter. I start thinking that no one in the world is who they say the are, then my mind goes to how I also edit myself, not just online but in real life, except for those rare instances like right now where I'm ranting- even though that's a lie because I've had this train of thought before and damned if I didn't tweak it in my head a few times to make it sound better- and then my mind starts racing so furiously I can't control my thoughts, and I start thinking about robots and wondering if I'm even a real person.”

“Then that's what the Northern Lights are. All the lives that we're not living.”

“The thing with thoughts is that they die, like everything else. But almost everything else leaves a trace behind, even if it's a tiny carcass, some proof that it existed. Unless thoughts are spoken or written or sung or acted upon, there's no evidence that they were ever there.”