Elan Mastai Quotes

#1. People talk about grief as emptiness, but it's not empty. It's full. Heavy. Not an absence to fill. A weight to pull. Your skin caught on hooks chained to rough boulders made of all the futures you thought you'd have.

Elan Mastai

#2. Life is defined mostly by how you handle failure.

Elan Mastai

#3. That's all science is. A collection of the best answers we have right now. It's always open to revision. Yesterday's fact is today's question and tomorrow has an answer we don't know yet.

Elan Mastai

#4. Maturity colonizes your adolescent mind, like an ultraviolet photograph of a vast cosmic nebula that turns out, on closer examination, to be a pointillist self-portrait.

Elan Mastai

#5. The problem with knowing people too well is that their words stop meaning anything and their silences start meaning everything.

Elan Mastai

#6. When you jump off a cliff, falling can look a whole lot like flying, for a while anyway.

Elan Mastai

#7. ...the most complex physics question was a breeze compared to the contradictions of the human heart.

Elan Mastai

#8. Unless you've touched a corpse before, you can't comprehend the visceral wrongness of inert flesh wrapped around an inanimate object that wears your mother's face.

Elan Mastai

#9. That's what love can do for you if you let it: build a person out of all your broken pieces. It doesn't matter if the stitches show. The stitches, the scars just prove you earned it.

Elan Mastai

#10. Is there a word for a thing you know you absolutely shouldn't do, that would be wrong in every way that matters to you, but that you're pretty sure you're going to do anyway? Or is that just - human? I

Elan Mastai

#11. The brain is a soupy lightning storm swirling and crackling in three pounds of wet meat. Do

Elan Mastai

#12. This is how you discover who someone is. Not the success. Not the result. The struggle. The part between the beginning and the ending that is the truth of life.

Elan Mastai

#13. Greta abides by the reasonable philosophy that there is nothing in the universe more boring than someone else's dreams.

Elan Mastai

#14. We must suffer fools gladly, otherwise how can we help them stop being fools?

Elan Mastai

#15. I remember, as a kid, when I first understood that only half of every tree is visible, that the roots in the soil are equal to the branches in the sky, that a whole other half is underground. It took me a lot longer, well into adulthood, to realize people are like that too.

Elan Mastai

#16. Every person you meet introduces the accident of that person to you. What can go right and what can go wrong. There is no intimacy without consequence. Which

Elan Mastai

#17. When you're young, you think of your parents with the simplest adjectives. As you get older, you add more adjectives and notice some of them contradict each other.

Elan Mastai

#18. Bland friendliness is easier than spending even one joule of energy formulating an opinion on someone fundamentally irrelevant to you.

Elan Mastai

#19. I try to formulate a plan but my thoughts are a toxic fizz of regret, panic, and self-loathing, as if someone shook up a bottle of carbonated soda and uncapped it inside my brain.

Elan Mastai

#20. What if every creative idea that someone has is unconsciously borrowed from that person's experiences in another reality? Maybe all ideas are plagiarized without us knowing it, because they come to us through some cryptic and unprovable reality slippage?

Elan Mastai

#21. We imagine all these postapocalyptic, class-stratified, new-world-order techno-futures. But actually the real world, the world we live in, this is the dystopia.

Elan Mastai

#22. There's no such thing as the life you're supposed to have.

Elan Mastai

#23. I want there to be nothing in me that isn't light and pure and good. But of course that's not real. That's what happens when you're a statue in a city square, stripped of any human adornment that can't be cast in bronze.

Elan Mastai

#24. They were married within a year and slotted themselves into their respective lifelong roles - my father was the lighthouse, my mother the keeper who wound the clockwork, polished the lenses, and swept all those rocky steps. My

Elan Mastai

#25. You believe what you do.

Elan Mastai

#26. She was your mother and she loved you in a way nobody ever has and nobody ever will and no she's gone.

Elan Mastai

#27. My mom once told me that's the secret of life. We all think we're frauds. Everybody's winging it.

Elan Mastai