{"author":"Megan Miranda","author_id":"Megan+Miranda","total_quotes":14,"quotes":[{"text":"The first time I died, I didn't see God. No light at the end of the tunnel. No haloed angels. No dead grandparents. To be fair, I probably wasn't a solid shoo-in for Heaven. But, honestly, I kind of assumed I'd make the cut.","author":"Megan Miranda","tags":["death","heaven"],"id":26189,"author_id":"Megan+Miranda"},{"text":"My mother always wanted to live near the water,' she said. 'She said it's the one thing that brings us all together. That I can have my toe in the ocean off the coast of Maine, and a girl my age can have her toe in the ocean off the coast of Africa, and we would be touching. On opposite sides of the world.","author":"Megan Miranda","tags":["africa","beautiful","coast","connect","connection","contact","country","death","distance","distances","foot","girl","inspirational","knowing","lake","linking","links","living","maine","mom","mother","mum","near","ocean","opposite","oppressive","proximity","relationship","sad","sea","shore","sides","thinking","thoughts","toe","together","true","truth","water","wisdom","wise","world"],"id":58703,"author_id":"Megan+Miranda"},{"text":"I thought that this must be what purgatory was like. Can't go forward. Can't go back. Awaiting some official judgment.","author":"Megan Miranda","tags":["hell","purgatory"],"id":78080,"author_id":"Megan+Miranda"},{"text":"If you had one day left to live, what would you do?","author":"Megan Miranda","tags":["life","sad"],"id":105105,"author_id":"Megan+Miranda"},{"text":"You want to believe you're not the saddest person in the world.","author":"Megan Miranda","tags":["loneliness","sadness"],"id":143886,"author_id":"Megan+Miranda"},{"text":"If there's a feeling to home, it's this. A place where there are no secrets, where nothing stays buried; not the past and not yourself. Where you can be all the versions of you, see it all reflected back at you as you walk the same stairs, the same halls, the same rooms. Feel the ghost of your mother as you sit at the kitchen table, hear the words of your father circling round and round after dinner, and your brother stopping by, wishing you'd be a little better, a little stronger.... It's four walls echoing back everything you've ever been and everything you've ever done, and it's the people who stay despite it all. Through it all. For it all.","author":"Megan Miranda","tags":["home"],"id":209467,"author_id":"Megan+Miranda"},{"text":"I think...I think its always been you who was dying,'- Delaney.","author":"Megan Miranda","tags":["death"],"id":229814,"author_id":"Megan+Miranda"},{"text":"But here, the rain was just another part of the landscape. Like it was the thing that lived here and we were merely visitors.","author":"Megan Miranda","tags":["all-the-missing-girls","home","landscape","rain"],"id":239041,"author_id":"Megan+Miranda"},{"text":"I hoped he'd take his dog and drive down to the ocean. I hoped there was still time. I pictured him sitting on the gray rocks with the waves crashing and spraying white foam. Maybe he'd hear something in the roar of the ocean, feel some limitless power, believe that there's something greater. Something more. Maybe his heaven was at the coast, with a dog's head in his lap, with nothing but water and depth from there to the horizon.' -Delaney.","author":"Megan Miranda","tags":["heaven","life"],"id":278369,"author_id":"Megan+Miranda"},{"text":"I miss it like an ex-con misses the other inmates.","author":"Megan Miranda","tags":["nostalgia"],"id":291946,"author_id":"Megan+Miranda"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":14,"pages":2,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}