The Great Believers

grief

• This city was a graveyard… when they stepped through a pocket of cold air, didn't they understand it was a ghost, it was a boy the world had spat out?

  GB-009

• Shadow-paintings no one can see but you. But there are all these happy young people around you and they don't see the empty spaces.

  GB-008

trauma-and-survival

• This disease has magnified all our mistakes. Some stupid thing you did when you were nineteen—and it turns out that was the most important day of your life.

  GB-010

• Yale's mind kept reaching for metaphors, because the simple fact of it—that this was Charlie—was too much.

  GB-006

intimacy

• No one had touched him, not really, since his life had fallen apart… being touched was Yale's weakness, always had been, like a vitamin deficiency.

  GB-011

• Claire didn't elbow her away… Why hadn't she thought to pick her up in the first place? Why did it take a stranger to tell her this?

  GB-016