Ashley Winstead > Quotes

“Sometimes, you really didn’t have to lift a finger to get exactly what you wanted. Sometimes, all you had to do was sit back and do nothing.”
― Ashley Winstead, In My Dreams I Hold a Knife

“Wanting is dangerous. The less you want, the safer you'll be.”
― Ashley Winstead, In My Dreams I Hold a Knife

“It turns out the real you is a quilt, made up of the light and the dark. The life you’ve lived in sunshine and your shadow life, stretching underneath the surface of your mind like a deep underwater world, exerting invisible power. You are a living, breathing story made up of the moments in time you cherish, all strung together, and those you hide. The moments that seem lost. Until the day they’re not.”
― Ashley Winstead, In My Dreams I Hold a Knife

“I wanted them to see perfection. I ached for it in the deep, dark core of me: to be so good I left other people in the dust.”
― Ashley Winstead, In My Dreams I Hold a Knife

“But no matter how much I tried to cling to the shining jewels of my accomplishments, it never took long before my shadow list surfaced. Everything I’d ever failed at, every second place, every rejection, mounting, mounting, mounting, until the suspicion became unbearable. (...) My life was a narrative I couldn’t parse, full of conflicting evidence.”
― Ashley Winstead, In My Dreams I Hold a Knife

“In ten years,” Heather said slowly, “you’re not even going to remember the things that seem important now. You’re going to have totally different priorities. I bet you’ll look back and laugh at everything that feels so dramatic now.”
― Ashley Winstead, In My Dreams I Hold a Knife

“A reader, then.” He eyed me. “Dangerous quality in a girl.”
― Ashley Winstead, Midnight Is the Darkest Hour

“I’d pretended I was fine, pretended I’d moved on, but the truth was, the past was still open inside me, like a half-cracked door, because it was a raw, unhealed wound.”
― Ashley Winstead, In My Dreams I Hold a Knife

“If only it was always like this. If beauty was purely a power and not a target, a vulnerability that could draw the wolves and put you at their mercy.”
― Ashley Winstead, The Last Housewife

“It was all so clear now, so terrifyingly obvious. I was the villain; I always had been. It explained everything—why I’d never gotten what I wanted, no matter how hard I’d tried. It wasn’t because life was unfair, or not working the way it should. I’d had it backwards my whole life: I wasn’t the princess, set upon by misfortune; I was the witch. And life had unfolded the way it was supposed to, giving me what I deserved.”
― Ashley Winstead, In My Dreams I Hold a Knife

“What did you call yourself when you’d taken an active role in your own suffering? When your hands weren’t clean, when there wasn’t a single part of you that was, especially not your mind, all those deep, dark corners?”
― Ashley Winstead, The Last Housewife

“there’s no such thing as an objective observer. That’s why stories are powerful. If you’re listening, you’re part of it.”
― Ashley Winstead, The Last Housewife

“You’re a narcissist. You’ve always been vain and petty and ego-driven. You have serious daddy issues and a fucked-up dating history—including, most notably, with me. You always take the safe route because you’re scared. Case in point, your lame corporate job. You try so goddamn hard to make everything perfect because you’re convinced that’s the only way you’ll deserve—what? Love? Life, even? And as far as the world is concerned, you pushed my college roommate out a window to his death.”
― Ashley Winstead, In My Dreams I Hold a Knife

“I’m telling you upfront. I need more. I need you over and over. So this is your out. Take it. Otherwise you’re mine, the way it should have been”
― Ashley Winstead, In My Dreams I Hold a Knife

“It was strange, really, how your entire life could change just like that, from one second to the next. And there was no fireworks show, no dramatic tilting of the world on its axis to signify how everything had suddenly flipped upside down, and nothing would ever be the same.”
― Ashley Winstead, In My Dreams I Hold a Knife

“Even now, to this day, I think you were the love of my life. You were always talking about your dreams, back in college. Harvard this and DC that. Well, you want to know what my dream was? You. A real best friend.” My eyes burned. Caro’s voice softened. “I would have done anything for you.”
― Ashley Winstead, In My Dreams I Hold a Knife

“Happiness? That was a luxury I'd never been able to afford.”
― Ashley Winstead, In My Dreams I Hold a Knife

“Before we begin, I need you to know: We no longer exist for them, you and I. We are no longer a mirror reflecting their anxieties, their desires. We are not saviors, or seductresses, or symbols. We exist only for ourselves. Tragic and sublime, ordinary and animal, in the mold of all humans, long before and long after us. They will tell you you’ve done the right thing. They will tell you you’ve made a grave error. Pay them no mind. Talk to me instead… Tell me about the time you looked up at the moon when you were a child and imagined it was looking back. Tell me about the moment your body first fit against the curves of another’s, and you felt at home. Tell me how you’ve ached to be bigger than this mortal life could grant, bigger than they would allow, how you’ve carried that ache in the center of your chest every hour of your life, the pain like a festering wound, a shrine to the bittersweet agony of being alive. Tell me these things, and I will tell you I know you. Let’s show each other our pieces, and tell each other we understand. It’s the strongest power we possess, the transfiguration of the unfathomable into something we can recognize, something that bridges the gulfs between us.”
― Ashley Winstead, The Last Housewife

“Under the surface, in the cold, in the salt, swallowed by waves, I pressed my eyes shut, letting myself sink. And in that moment a wild wishing came over me. I wanted to stay here, submerged forever. Above the surface, all the days of my life were waiting like a promise. There was nothing but a blank slate, and anything goes, and what if. My life could mean anything, I could become anyone, as long as I didn’t break surface, as long as I stayed here, suspended, in this beautiful, infinite now.”
― Ashley Winstead, In My Dreams I Hold a Knife

“In a million years, I never would’ve guessed that the first time I’d fall in love, it would be with the earth itself.”
― Ashley Winstead, Midnight Is the Darkest Hour

“The law is nuanced and complicated, and I like nuanced and complicated.”
― Ashley Winstead, In My Dreams I Hold a Knife

“Or maybe I realized people are rarely interested in another person's pain - so you have to dress it up accordingly.”
― Ashley Winstead, The Last Housewife

“Let him go. That was what the world expected. What they always expect of women—grace, forgiveness, moral superiority. We were supposed to look our rapists in the eyes, the men who’d tortured us, and show them mercy.”
― Ashley Winstead, The Last Housewife

“That’s the upside of being the pastor’s daughter and the Devil’s son, two outcasts who became friends the way we did. From the start, nothing has been off-limits.”
― Ashley Winstead, Midnight is the Darkest Hour

“A woman who wanted was an ugly thing. I knew it made me childish and vulnerable. My whole life had taught me that lesson. But still. For one moment, laid out on the grass, all my ruined, pointless, pent-up wanting was too great to contain—”
― Ashley Winstead, In My Dreams I Hold a Knife

“And I knew, with all my heart and soul, that I’d loved him, and he’d been good and wicked, and in the dark, secret part of me, we were so much the same.”
― Ashley Winstead, In My Dreams I Hold a Knife

“Memories are powerful things. But—and this is important, my therapist said—so are the dark spaces. The things you choose, consciously or not, to repress. Always, they’re the things you need protection from. The too much: too terrifying, too shameful, too devastating. The things that, if allowed, would threaten the very core of who you’re supposed to be.”
― Ashley Winstead, In My Dreams I Hold a Knife

“What is it about us teenage girls that claws so deeply under people’s skin? We’re reviled and desired in equal measure; cringed at, laughed at, then lunged at.”
― Ashley Winstead, Midnight Is the Darkest Hour

“But over the years, the precious tightness of their circle had loosened, stretching to accommodate other friends, other interests, the occasional spring break with other people. Maybe it was only natural—inevitable (...). Everything felt so precarious, like one gentle nudge was all it would take to send it shattering.”
― Ashley Winstead, In My Dreams I Hold a Knife

“Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”
― Ashley Winstead, In My Dreams I Hold a Knife