“Depression isn't a war you win. It's a battle you fight every day. You never stop, never get to rest. It's one bloody fray after another.”
Work
<b>A <i>Time</i> Best YA Book of All Time (2021)</b><br> <br><b>From the “author to watch” (<i>Kirkus Reviews</i>) of <i>The Five Stages of Andrew Brawley </i>comes a brand-new novel about a teenage boy who must decide whether or not the world is worth saving.</b><br><br>Henry Denton has spent years being periodically abducted by aliens. Then the aliens give him an ultimatum: The world will end in 144 days, and all Henry has to do to stop it is push a big red button.<br> <br>Only he isn’t sure he wants to.<br> <br>After all, life hasn’t been great for Henry. His mom is a struggling waitress held together by a thin layer of cigarette smoke. His brother is a jobless dropout who just knocked someone up. His grandmother is slowly losing herself to Alzheimer’s. And Henry is still dealing with the grief of his boyfriend’s suicide last year.<br> <br>Wiping the slate clean sounds like a pretty good choice to him.<br> <br>But Henry is a scientist first, and facing the question thoroughly and logically, he begins to look for pros and cons: in the bully who is his perpetual one-night stand, in the best friend who betrayed him, in the brilliant and mysterious boy who walked into the wrong class. Weighing the pain and the joy that surrounds him, Henry is left with the ultimate choice: push the button and save the planet and everyone on it…or let the world—and his pain—be destroyed forever.
Quotes
Showing 1-15 of 15
Shaun David Hutchinson
Canonical work source
“Depression isn't a war you win. It's a battle you fight every day. You never stop, never get to rest. It's one bloody fray after another.”
“We're not words, Henry, we're people. Words are how others define us, but we can define ourselves any way we choose.”
“I saw the world from the stars' point of view, and it looked unbearably lonely.”
“Sometimes I think gravity may be death in disguise. Other times I think gravity is love, which is why love's only demand is that we fall.”
“We may not get to choose how we die, but we can chose how we live. The universe may forget us, but it doesn't matter. Because we are the ants, and we'll keep marching on.”
“That's the problem with memories: you can visit them, but you can't live in them.”
“Dreams are hopeful because they exist as pure possibility. Unlike memories, which are fossils, long dead and buried deep.”
“I was diamond on the outside, and I would not break. Inside, though, I was already broken.”
“Popularity is teenage heroin.”
“Because you can only die once but you can suffer forever.”
“As human beings, we're born believing that we are the apex of creation, that we are invincible, that no problem exists that we cannot solve. But we inevitably die with all our beliefs broken...”
“I could write my name across the sky, and it would be in invisible ink.”
“We remember the past, live in the present, and write the future.”
“Your entire sense of self-worth is predicated upon your belief that you matter, that you matter to the universe. But you don't. Because we are the ants.”
“History is just a way of keeping score, but it doesn't have to be who we are.”