The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue

What is a person, if not the marks they leave behind?

There is a freedom, after all, in being forgotten

Books, she has found, are a way to live a thousand lives—or to find strength in a very long one.

“But isn’t it wonderful,” she says, “to be an idea?”

You do not know what love is

that ideas are so much wilder than memories, that they long and look for ways of taking root.

rise and fall of his shoulders, the place where his dark hair curls against the nape of his neck, the scar along his ribs. Details long memorized.

His name is Toby.

“Nothing is all good or all bad,” she says. “Life is so much messier than that.”

Perhaps because when truth is not an option, fiction takes on a mind of its own.

The vexing thing about time,” he says, “is that it’s never enough. Perhaps a decade too short, perhaps a moment