Ava Dellaira

“If beauty is truth, and truth is beauty, they are defined by each other, so how do we know the meaning of either?”

“Sometimes your music sounds like there’s too much inside you. Maybe even you couldn’t get it all out. Maybe that’s why you died. Like you exploded from the inside.”

“I guess somethings turned out too sad even to be explained with a bases-loaded strikeout.”

“What’s left of what your body was —once the girl with bare shoulder blades , giggling, once the girl galloping an imaginary horse, once the girl sleeping in her sequined red dress— was now ash in a jar. Grains of bone. But then, I knew it wasn’t you anymore. You were somewhere more.”

“I don´t know anyone who has a perfect family to start with. And I think that´s why we make up our own. regular weirdos together. I feel that way about my friends.”

“It seemed everyone knew their place in it, but I was in the mood where I would rather be alone and look a houseplants.”

“When parents talk about their pasts, the stories start to stick in your head. But the memories that you inherit look different from the now-world, and different from your own memories, too. Like they have a color all their own. I don’t mean sepia-toned or something. My parents aren’t even that old. I just mean that there is something particular about their glow.”

“How could she just leave me here to live without her? I miss her so much. I love her. I want her to grow up and become who she was meant to be. I wanted her to grow up with me.”

“You learned right away that applause sounds like love.”

“I know I could have saved your ashes to put into the ocean, but I wanted you to have the journey, all the way with the currents, to the open sea. And I know that when I finally get to see the waves washing on the shore, to hear them, I will feel you there.”

“I think that I've been trying for a long time to feel like I am supposed to, instead of what I actually am.”

“For the shadows to stop growing. For people to stop being angry.”

“Words can't be wood enough for a lot of things. But you know, I guess we have to try.”

“I have found that sometimes, moments get stuck in your body. They are there, lodged under your skin like hard seed-stones of wonder or sadness or fear, everything else growing up around them. And if you turn a certain way, if you fall, one of them could get free. It might dissolve in your blood, or it might spring up a whole tree. Sometimes, once one of them gets out, they all start to go.”

“There are a lot of human experiences that challenge the limits of our language.”

“Because I think that by beauty, you don't just mean something that's pretty. You mean something that makes us human.”

“Our flushing hearts, trying to climb to the stars- how with the wrong wind, we can fall.”

“People love you for what they want to see in you, not for what you are. That's a sad thing to learn.”

“I know I wrote letters to people with no address on this earth, I know that you are dead. But I hear you. I hear all of you. We were here. Our lives matter.”