Conor Blinked. Then Blinked Again. “You’re Going To Tell Me Stories?” Indeed, The Monster Said.

Every time you look up at the stars, it’s like opening a door. You could be anyone, anywhere. You could be yourself at any moment in your life. You open that door and you realize you’re the same person under the same stars. Camping out in the backyard with your best friend, eleven years old. Sixteen, driving alone, stopping at the edge of the city, looking up at the same stars. Walking a wooded path, kissing in the moonlight, look up and you’re eleven again. Chasing cats in a tiny town, you’re eleven again, you’re sixteen again. You’re in a rowboat. You’re staring out the back of a car. Out here where the world begins and ends, it’s like nothing ever stops happening.

Lost at Sea by Bryan Lee O'Malley

Sometimes you know in your heart you love someone, but you have to go away before your head can figure it out.

'Walk Two Moons' by Sharon Creech

I am a collection of oddities, a circus of neurons and electrons: my heart is the ringmaster, my soul is the trapeze artist, and the world is my audience. It sounds strange because it is, and it is, because I am strange.

Mosquitoland by David Arnold 

I fall in love with these kids over and over again and my heart aches for their tragedies and marvels at their friendship.

'On the Jellicoe Road' by Melina Marchetta

I wish we could go back in time and climb trees together again. I love you, Vera. I always will.

'Please Ignore Vera Dietz' by A.S. King

Always learn poems by heart. They have to become the marrow in your bones. Like fluoride in the water, they'll make your soul impervious to the world's soft decay.

'White Oleander' by Janet Fitch 

I howl. I howl at the roof like a hotted-up bomb doing donuts, full of screeches. I howl like an air-raid siren, my arms stretched out wide. Howls are like songs. They can’t be summoned; they just happen. They come from a place that I barely understand. And then something else climbs to the surface, something black and jagged, something from the deep. Imagine all your worst feelings surfacing. Imagine coughing up razor blades. Imagine not being able to stop the pain from coming out, and not knowing when it’s going to end.

'This is Shyness' by Leanne Hall 

"Every time he looked at me I felt like I'd touched my tongue to the tip of a battery. In art class I'd watch him lean back and listen and I was nothing but zing and tingle. After a while, the tingle turned to electricity, and when he asked me out my whole body amped to a level where technically I should have been dead. I had nothing in common with a sheddy like him, but a girl doesn't think straight when she's that close to electrocution."

'Graffiti Moon' by Cath Crowley 

Oh nothing, just Paul McCartney casually predicting the misogynistic blame-game the media put on Yoko Ono …

What is ~time~