Emma Noyes > Quotes

“But this isn’t an illness. This can’t be cured with a few hugs and a capful of pink goo. This is me. Every thought, no matter how bizarre, no matter how disturbing—I create it. It comes from me. It’s made of me. Your thoughts are the mental manifestation of what you look like inside. Rotten thoughts? Rotten insides.”
― Emma Noyes, How to Hide in Plain Sight

“He says he tried. She says he didn’t even begin. She says her heart holds so much more. He says that’s all he can give. He can’t fix himself. She can’t take her love away. They both wish they could.”
― Emma Noyes, Guy's Girl

“If Ginny chooses him, she chooses his quiet, too.”
― Emma Noyes, Guy's Girl

“I would love nothing more than to take a look inside that brilliant mind of yours.”
― Emma Noyes, Guy's Girl

“Memory of pain is often worse than the pain itself. It drives us. What we do or don’t do, embrace or fear, repeat or avoid at all costs—all of that is dictated by our memory of pain.”
― Emma Noyes, How to Hide in Plain Sight

“Anxiety is a surgeon skilled at carving things open that were never meant to be touched in the first place. She will examine your life from every angle. Look for cracks, abrasions, weak spots, doubts. And when she finds one, she will pick it apart, bone by bone, worry by worry, until you can no longer tell truth from fiction.”
― Emma Noyes, Guy's Girl

“it has planted a seed of doubt in my mind. And that seed will grow. It will grow lips and teeth and a jawline. It will argue with me. It will send me in circles. Awful, torturous circles. I will never know the truth. I will never know my own sexuality.”
― Emma Noyes, How to Hide in Plain Sight

“Youth is good for that; drink yourself to chaos and wake free of the consequences. Poison yourself within an inch of death—on purpose—and bounce back so quickly you’d think nothing ever happened. Some unknown mechanism lets us skip the pain. Call it genetics. Call it invincibility. Call it the power of a blank slate, of a body not yet punished enough to reveal its cracks. It’s an ability of which we aren’t even aware, but we miss it when it leaves. Resilience is wasted on the young. Our ability to push past anything, even embarrassment, even poison. Spring back into life, gait unchanged, suffering nothing more than vertigo and an invisible heap of sorrow amassing in the pit of our stomachs. A growing heap of trauma. Add to the pile with every fake smile, every unacknowledged ordeal. Dig into it only years later. By then, the heap will have grown so large it will be impossible to see all at once. But for now, it lies dormant, growing, collecting misery.”
― Emma Noyes, How to Hide in Plain Sight