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| John Green, 2006 |
"That's what I was thinking about before you came. I was thinking about your mattering business. I feel like, how you matter is defined by the things hat matter to you. You matter as much as the things that matter to you do. And I got so backwards, trying to make myself matter to him. All this tome, there were real things to care about: real good people who care about me, and this place. It's so easy to get stuck. You just get caught in being something, being special or cool or whatever, to the point where you don't even know why you need it; you just think you do"
"And the moral of the story is that you don't remember what happened. What you remember becomes what happened. And the second moral of the story, if a story can have multiple morals, is that Dumpers are not inherently worse than Dumpees- breaking up isn't something that gets done to you; its something that happens with you."
"But there's another way. There are stories. Colin was looking at Lindsey, whose eyes were crinkling into a smile as Hassan loaned her nine cents so they could keep playing. Colin thought of Lindsey's storytelling lessons. The stories they'd told each other were so much a part of the how and why of his liking her. Okay. Loving. Four days in, and already, indisputably: loving. And he found himself thinking that maybe stories don't juts make us matter to each other- maybe they're also the only way to the infinite mattering he'd been after for so long. And Colin thought: Because like say I tell someone about my feral hog hunt. Even if it's a dumb story, telling it changes other people just the slightest bit, just as living the story changes me. An infinitesimal change. And that infinitesimal change ripples outwards- ever smaller but everlasting. I will get forgotten, but the stories will last. And so we all matter- maybe less than a lot but always more than none"
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