2. “You are all the colors in one, at full brightness.” – Theodore Finch
3. “We do not remember days. We remember moments.” – Theodore Finch
4. “All because she smiled at me, but it was a damn good smile. A genuine one which is hard to come by these days.” – Theodore Finch
5. “The great thing about this life of ours is that you can be someone different to everybody.” – Theodore Finch
6. “I stand in front of the mirror and study my face. It is the face of a sad, lonely girl something bad has happened to. I wonder if my face will ever look the same again, or if I’ll always see it in my reflection—Finch, Eleanor, loss, heartache, guilt, death.” – Violet Markey
7. “The problem with people is they forget that most of the time, it’s the small things that count.” – Violet Markey
8. “You make me lovely, and it’s so lovely to be lovely to the one I love.” – Theodore Finch
9. “The fact is, I was sick, but not in an easily explained flu kind of way. It’s my experience that people are a lot more sympathetic if they can see you hurting, and for the millionth time in my life, I wish for measles, or smallpox, or some other easily understood disease just to make it easier on me and also on them.” – Theodore Finch
10. “I’ve got a map in my car that wants to be used, and I think there are places we can go that need to be seen. Maybe, no one else will ever visit them, and appreciate them, or take the time to think they’re important, but maybe, even the smallest places mean something.” – Theodore Finch
11. “The thing is, they were all perfect days.” – Violet Markey
12. “Love is truly the great manifesto. The urge to be, to count for something, and if death must come, to die valiantly with acclamation—in short, to remain a memory.” – Theodore Finch
13. “You have been in every way all that anyone could be. If anybody could have saved me, it would have been you.” – Theodore Finch
14. “I think of my own epitaph, still to be written, and all the places I’ll wander. No longer rooted, but gold, flowing. I feel a thousand capacities spring up in me.” – Violet Markey
15. “Sometimes, there’s beauty in the tough words—it’s all in how you read them.” – Violet Markey
16. “We are all alone, trapped in these bodies and our own minds, and whatever company we have in this life is only fleeting and superficial.” – Theodore Finch
17. “No more winter at all, Finch, you brought me spring.” – Violet Markey
18. “I learned that there is good in this world if you look hard enough for it. I learned that not everyone is disappointing, including me, and that a 1,257-foot bump in the ground can feel higher than a bell tower if you’re standing next to the right person.” – Theodore Finch
19. “Sorry wastes time. You have to live your life like you’ll never be sorry. It’s easier just to do the right thing from the start, so there’s nothing to apologize for.” – Violet Markey
20. “I do my best thinking at night when everyone else is sleeping. No interruptions. No noise. I like the feeling of being awake when no one else is.” – Theodore Finch
21. “Stars in the sky, stars on the ground. It’s hard to tell where the sky ends and the earth begins. I feel the need to say something grand and poetic, but the only thing I come up with is ‘It’s lovely.'” – Violet Markey
22. “When you consider things like the stars, our affairs don’t seem to matter very much, do they?” – Violet Markey
23. “I walk through the black Indiana night, under a ceiling of stars, and think about the phrase ‘elegance and euphoria,’ and how it describes exactly what I feel with Violet.” – Theodore Finch
24. “You saved my life. Why couldn’t I save yours?” – Violet Markey
25. “Maybe, if I wear the glasses long enough, I can be like her. I can see what she saw. I can be both of us at once, so no one will have to miss her, most of all me.” – Violet Markey
26. “The future is uncertain, but that can be a good thing.” – Theodore Finch
27. “You need shoving, not pushing. You need to jump back on that camel. Otherwise, you’re going to stay up on the ledge you’ve made for yourself.” – Violet Markey
28. “Because it’s not a lie if it’s how you feel.” – Theodore Finch
29. “We alternate choosing places to go, but we also have to be willing to go where the road takes us. This means the grand, the small, the bizarre, the poetic, the beautiful, the ugly, the surprising. Just like life.” – Theodore Finch
30. “I am on the highest branch. We are written in paint. I believe in signs. The glow of ultraviolet, a lake, a prayer. It’s so lovely to be lovely in private.” – Theodore Finch
31. “What a terrible feeling to love someone and not be able to help them.” – Violet Markey
32. “Ultraviolet Remarkey-able, I think I love you.” – Theodore Finch
33. “For once, I don’t want to be anyone but Theodore Finch, the boy she sees. He understands what it is to be elegant and euphoric and a hundred different people, most of them flawed and stupid, part asshole, part screwup, part freak. A boy who wants to be easy for the folks around him so that he doesn’t worry them and, most of all, easy for himself. A boy who belongs here in the world, here in his own skin. He is exactly who I want to be and what I want my epitaph to say: The Boy Violet Markey Loves.” – Theodore Finch
34. “And in that moment, there’s nothing I fear except losing hold of her hand.” – Theodore Finch
35. “You deserve better. I can’t promise you I’ll stay around, not because I don’t want to. It’s hard to explain. I’m a fuckup. I’m broken, and no one can fix it. I’ve tried. I’m still trying. I can’t love anyone because it’s not fair to anyone who loves me back. I’ll never hurt you, not like I want to hurt Roamer. But I can’t promise I won’t pick you apart, piece by piece, until you’re in a thousand pieces, just like me. You should know what you’re getting into before getting involved.” – Theodore Finch
36. “She is oxygen, carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, calcium, and phosphorus. The same elements that are inside the rest of us, but I can’t help thinking she’s more than that, and she’s got other elements going on that no one’s ever heard of, ones that make her stand apart from everybody else. I feel this brief panic as I think. What would happen if one of those elements malfunctioned or just stopped working altogether? I make myself push this aside and concentrate on the feel of her skin until I no longer see molecules but Violet.” – Theodore Finch
37. “You make me love you, and that could be the greatest thing my heart was ever fit to do.” – Theodore Finch
38. “I remember running down a road on my way to a nursery of flowers. I remember her smile and her laugh when I was my best self, and she looked at me like I could do no wrong and was whole. I remember how she looked at me the same way even when I wasn’t. I remember her hand in mine and how that felt as if something and someone belonged to me.” – Theodore Finch
39. “Lovely is a lovely word that should be used more often.” – Violet Markey
40. “You are driving me crazy. You have been driving me crazy for weeks.” – Violet Markey
41. “But I bring it up to let you know that this is the way I feel right now. Like Pluto and Jupiter are aligned with the earth, and I’m floating.” – Theodore Finch
42. “You know what I like about you, Finch? You’re interesting. You’re different, and I can talk to you. Don’t let that go to your head.” – Violet Markey
43. “Even when we weren’t wandering, even from the floor of your closet, you showed the world to me.” – Violet Markey
44. “You’re so weird, Finch, but that’s the nicest thing anyone’s ever said to me.” – Violet Markey
45. “Just be careful with that heart of yours.” – Violet Markey
46. “Which of my feelings are real? Which of the mess is me? There is only one me I’ve ever really liked, and he was good and awake as long as he could be.” – Theodore Finch
47. “Labels like ‘bipolar’ say this is why you are the way you are. This is who you are. They explain people away as illnesses.” – Theodore Finch
48. “I should be happy, but instead, I feel nothing. I feel a lot of nothing these days. I’ve cried a few times, but mostly I’m empty as if whatever makes me feel, and hurt, and laugh, and love has been surgically removed, leaving me hollowed out like a shell.” – Violet Markey
49. “I am broken. I am a fraud. I am impossible to love.” – Theodore Finch
50. “Listen, I’m the freak. I’m the weirdo. I’m the troublemaker. I start fights. I let people down. Don’t make Finch mad, whatever you do. Oh, there he goes again, in one of his moods. Moody Finch. Angry Finch. Unpredictable Finch. Crazy Finch.” – Theodore Finch
51. “Worthless, stupid—these are the words I grew up hearing. They’re the words I try to outrun because if I let them in, they might stay there, and grow, and fill me up, and in, until the only thing left of me is worthless, stupid, worthless, stupid, worthless, stupid freak. And then, there’s nothing to do but run harder and fill myself with other words. This time will be different. This time, I will stay awake.” – Theodore Finch
52. “Do whatever it takes to remind myself that I’m still here and have a say.” – Theodore Finch
53. “I’m not a compilation of symptoms. Not a casualty of shitty parents and an even shittier chemical makeup. Not a problem. Not a diagnosis. Not an illness. Not something to be rescued. I’m a person.” – Theodore Finch
54. “You don’t know how it is. It’s like, I’ve got this angry, little person inside me, and I can feel him trying to get out. He’s running out of room because he’s growing bigger and bigger, and so he starts rising up into my lungs, chest, throat, and I just push him right back down. I don’t want him to come out. I can’t let him out.” – Violet Markey
55. “You might expect me to say ‘life,’ having just woken up and all, but it’s only when I’m awake that I think about dying.” – Theodore Finch
56. “Theodore Finch—I was alive. I burned brightly, and then I died, but not really. Because someone like me cannot, will not, die like everyone else. I linger like the legends of the Blue Hole. I will always be here in the offerings and people I left behind.” – Violet Markey
57. “Your hope lies in accepting your life as it now lies before you, forever changed. If you can do that, the peace you seek will follow, forever changed. I am forever changed.” – Violet Markey
58. “‘Are you feeling okay?’ I try not to sound like the blaming girlfriend. Why won’t you spend time with me? Why won’t you call me back? Don’t you like me anymore?” – Violet Markey
59. “You can’t stop people from dying. You can’t stop them from going away. You can’t stop yourself from going away either. I know myself well enough to know that no one else can keep you awake or keep you from sleeping.” – Theodore Finch
60. “For a minute, I can feel it—the sense of peace as my mind goes quiet, like I’m already dead. I am weightless and free. Nothing and no one to fear, not even myself.” – Theodore Finch
61. “Suddenly, I’m having one of those moments that you have after losing someone—when you feel as if you’ve been kicked in the stomach, and all your breath is gone, and you might never get it back. I want to sit down in the dirty, littered ground right now and cry until I can’t cry anymore.” – Violet Markey
62. “None of us knows how long we have, maybe another month, maybe another 50 years. I like living as if I only have that two days.” – Theodore Finch
63. “I take a good long look at her. I know life well enough to know you can’t count on things staying around or standing still, no matter how much you want them to.” – Theodore Finch
64. “Disguise the pain. Don’t call attention. Don’t be noticed.” – Theodore Finch
65. “I wasn’t worried about what would happen if I lived. I was worried about what would happen if I didn’t.” – Violet Markey
66. “The thing is, there are good days and bad days. I feel almost guilty saying they aren’t all bad.” – Violet Markey
67. “What if life could be this way? Only the happy parts, none of the terrible, not even the mildly unpleasant. What if we could just cut out the bad and keep the good? This is what I want to do with Violet—give her only the good, keep away the bad, so that good is all we ever have around us.” – Theodore Finch
68. “I like writing, but I like a lot of things. Maybe, out of those things, I’m best at writing. Maybe, it’s what I like best of all. Maybe, it’s where I’ve always felt most at home, or maybe the writing part of me is over. Maybe, there’s something else I’m supposed to do instead. I don’t know.” – Violet Markey
69. “If a song’s meant to stay around, you carry it with you in your bones.” – Theodore Finch
70. “If that blue could stay forever. If that hole could remain forever, there was nothing to make him last.” – Theodore Finch
71. “Drive anywhere and everywhere, even when there’s nowhere to go.” – Theodore Finch
72. “The great Anna Faris once said that the secret of surviving high school is to ‘lay low.'” – Violet Markey
73. “We all have a shelf life.” – Theodore Finch
74. “When we’re in the act of wondering, we need to be present, not watching it through a lens.” – Theodore Finch
75. “If there’s one thing I know, it’s that no one can promise anything.” – Violet Markey
76. “I guess you can be yourself, whatever that means, the best and worst of you, and they love you anyway. You can fight, but even when you’re mad at them, you know they’re not going to stop being your friend.” – Violet Markey
77. “Let’s go. Let’s count for something. Let’s get off that ledge.” – Theodore Finch
78. “Since I stopped writing, I read more than ever. Other people’s words, not my own—my words are gone.” – Violet Markey
79. Theodore Finch: “We don’t have to.”
Violet Markey: “I know.”
80. “You’ve got at least a thousand capacities in you. Even if you don’t think so.” – Theodore Finch
81. “Never bullshit a bullshitter.” – Theodore Finch
82. Violet Markey: “The why is that none of it matters. Not school, not cheerleading, not boyfriends, or friends, or parties, or creative writing programs or—. It’s all just time filler until we die.”
Theodore Finch: “Maybe. Maybe not. Whether it’s filler or not, I’m pretty glad to be here.”
83. “You’ll be departing our great state, and before you do, you should see it. You should wander.” – Mr. Black
84. “She sets down the bucket and undoes the latch. For a few seconds, all she does is breathe in the scent of the flowers, and then she turns to me, and without a word, kisses me.” – Theodore Finch
85. “The walls are lined with school photos, Finch in kindergarten, Finch in middle school. He looks different every year, not just age-wise but person wise. Class-clown Finch. Awkward Finch. Cocky Finch. Jock Finch.” – Theodore Finch
86. Violet Markey: “Where would you go if you could go anywhere?”
Theodore Finch: “I’d go to a place no one’s ever been before. Undiscovered. Untouched.”
87. “I don’t need to worry that Finch and I never filmed our wanderings. It’s okay that we didn’t collect souvenirs or that we never had time to pull it all together in a way that made sense to anyone else but us.” – Violet Markey
88. “Often, mental and emotional illnesses go undiagnosed because the person suffering symptoms is too ashamed to speak up, or because their loved ones either fail to or choose not to recognize the signs.” – Jennifer Niven, Author
89. “People rarely bring flowers to a suicide.” – Jennifer Niven, Author
