love is a mix tape

"Tonight, I feel like my whole body is made out of memories. I'm a mix tape, a cassette that's been rewound so many times you can hear the fingerprints smudged on the tape." (12)

"It's a fundamental human need to pass music around, and however the technology evolves, the music keeps moving." (24)

"Every mix tape tells a story. Put them together, and t hey add up to the story of your life." (26)

"... she was a real people pleaser. She worried way too much what people thought of her, wore her heart on her sleeve, expected too much from people, and got hurt too easily. She kept other people's secrets like a champ, but told her own too fast. She expected the world not to cheat her and was always surprised when it did." (67)

"We were just a couple of fallen angels, rolling the dice of our lives." (80)

"What if we just decide not to fall apart? What if we decide not to wait to see what happens, but instead decide what we want to happen and then decide how to make it happen?" (81)

"'I only really want you for your rock and roll'." (94)

"This was the greatest band ever, obviously. And they didn't live twenty years ago, or ten years ago, or five years ago. They were right now. They were ours." (95)

"The new wave girls scams on other people's identities, mixing and matching until she comes up with a style of her own, knowing that nothing belongs to her, that she just gets to wear it until somebody comes along with faster fingers to snatch it away." (137)

"On the way we talked about the road sign BRIDGE FREEZES BEFORE ROAD. I always wondered, If that's a problem, why don't they just build the bridge out of the same stuff they use to build the road? Drema explained that the bridge isn't made out of different material than the road, but that the bridge ice quicker because it's alone, hanging there without the land under it to keep it warm." (147)

"I was surrounded by friends and family who wanted to help, but I was too frozen to admit how much I needed it." (155)

"I had no voice to talk with because she was my whole language." (156)

"You lose a kind of innocence when you experience this type of kindness. You lose your right to be a jaded cynic. You can no longer go back through the looking glass and pretend not to know what you know about kindness. It's a defeat, in a way." (164)

"Kindness is a scarier force than cruelty, that's for sure." (166)

"Human benevolence is totally unfair. We don't live in a kind or generous world, yet we are kind and generous. We know the universe is out to burn us, and it gets us all the way it got Renee, but we don't burn each other, not always. We are kind peole in an unkind world, to paraphrase Wallace Stevens. How do you go back to acting like you don't need it? How do you even the score and walk off a free man? You can't. I found myself forced to let go of all sorts of independence I thought I had, independence I had spent years trying to cultivate. That world wasall gone, and now I was a supplicant, dependent on the mercy of other people's psychic hearts.
I was awed and ruined by this knowledge. Renee knew it all the time; I was learning it these days." (167)

"The way I pictured it, all this grief would be like a winter night when you're standing outside. You'll warm up once you get used to the cold. Except after you've been out there a while, you feel the warmth draining out of you and you realize t he opposite is happening; you're getting colder and colder, as the body heat you brought outside with you seeps out of your skin. Instead of getting used to it, you get weaker the longer you endure it. I was trying so hard to be strong. I knew how to go out, how to stay in, how to get things done, but that was it." (173)

"I didn't want to have these experiences, didn't want to run into living things that reminded me of the past, I would have to hide under a rock-- except that would remind me of the past, too, so I try not to hide. What shocks me is that the present is alive." (217)