If I stay by Gayle Forman

A very different but interesting read. It about how someone copes when they lose it all...all that they could call their life with interesting out-of-body experience details thrown in. It brings out hope and the intrinsic fighting strength of humans.

The following are some interesting quotes from this book. They are keepers!

"How do you get over jitters? 

You don't. You just work through it. You just hang in there."

"The people who would normally pass along pertinent information that something has happened to me are in no position to do that."

"People believe what they want to believe"

"This is the first time someone has acknowledged what I have lost...the permission he just offered me -it feels like a gift."

"Sometimes you make choices in life and sometimed choices make you."

"Seventeen is an inconvenient time to be in love. All relationships are tough. Just like with music, sometimed you have harmony and other times you have cacophony."

"Losing me will hurt. It will be the kind of pain that won't feel real at first and when it does it will take her breath away. But she'll deal. She'll move on. And I bet she'll be a stronger person because of what she's lost today. I have a feeling that once you live through something like this, you become a little bit invincible."

"Maybe if I'd had more devastation in my life, I would be more prepared to ho on."

"It makes me happy to imagine them drinking tea or going to the movies together, still connected to each other by thr invisible chain of a family that no longer exists."

"But I'm also feeling all that I have in my life, which includes what I have lost, as well as the great unknown of what life might still bring me."

 

" transcendent grieving  doesn't last. Gloom descends, the awfulness of your loss hits you again and again. Real life gets on with itself. And eventually your loss normalizes, it integrates into part of your everyday life, and you find yourself 3 or 5 years later doing OK, changed but ... but still able to hear your friends' voices, still telling stories about them, still thinking of them every day. "

" In a way, they have never left me

 And that's just it, isn't it? That's how we manage to survuve loss. Because love never dies; it never goes away; it never fades. As long as you hang onto it"