The Past and Other Things That Should Stay Buried
Shaun David Hutchinson
Top 10 Best Quotes
“Love isn’t obvious until you’re in it. It’s not a punch in the face that leaves you reeling. Love is gradual and sneaky. It grows like weeds between the cracks of a hundred average moments.”
“The boxes that are supposed to help us understand one another ultimately wedge us further apart. Even worse is that we rage against the artificial divisions the boxes create, claim that we’re more complex and complicated than how we’re defined by others, and then turn around and stuff the next person we meet into one and tape the lid shut. And then, as if the indignity of life isn’t enough, when a person dies, we cram what’s left of them into one final box for eternity.”
“Grief is quiet. Grief is a strangled cry. Tears we hide. A scream in a vacuum where sound doesn’t carry. And though we try to share it, grief is ultimately a burden each of us must carry alone.”
“Because you were a freak and I was a freak, and being two freaks together was better than being two freaks alone.”
“Death is as normal and digestion. People move through life the way food moves through our bodies. Their natural usefulness is extracted along the way to help enrich the world, and when they have nothing left to give, they’re eliminated. Much like our bodies would clog up with excrement if we didn’t defecate, the world would do the same if we didn’t die.”
“The nerd in me that needs to understand everything is dying to drive July to a lab and cut off pieces of her to look at under a microscope to see if I can figure out what’s keeping her alive, and the poet in me wants to ask her a million questions about being dead so that I can understand how she sees the world and what the stars look like through eyes that once saw what’s on the other side of life. But July doesn’t need a nerd or a poet. She needs a friend, and I suppose that unenviable job has fallen to me.”
“You can tell me I’m dead until the words lose their meaning, but it won’t change that I’m not, and I don’t want to waste the time I have.”
“Of course my battery dies. Fucking figures the only thing dead in this coffin is the one thing that shouldn’t be.”
“I’ve never understood how doctors can smoke. It’s like a firefighter deliberately disabling the smoke detectors in her house and then setting fire to her couch.”
“Most of the time we work from a photograph - and most of the time the photograph is of the the person twenty years ago because every family member wants the body to look their best, which, whatever; we do makeup, not time travel.”
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Book Keywords:
humor, friendship, death, words, boxes, poet, waste, time, friend, teens, goth, labels, living, shaun-david-hutchinson, stereotypes, nerd, dark, life, people, live-life-to-the-fullest, interesting, dying, dead
