Amy Reed > Quotes

“What if I'm so broken I can never do something as basic as feed myself? Do you realize how twisted that is? It amazes me sometimes that humans still exist. We're just animals, after all. And how can an animal get so removed from nature that it loses the instinct to keep itself alive?”
― Amy Reed, Clean

“What if talking about your feelings doesn't fix anything? What if what you really need is to make the feelings go away?”
― Amy Reed, Crazy

“Imagine trying to live without air.
Now imagine something worse.”
― Amy Reed, Clean

“I feel like I'm a snow globe and someone shook me up and now every little piece of me is falling back randomly and nothing is ending up where it used to be.”
― Amy Reed, Crazy

“I wonder if anybody else feels this way, if anyone in here is as scared as I am. Are they as sad and angry and confused and ashamed? Is that even possible? Is it even possible for one building to hold all that pain?”
― Amy Reed, Clean

“Maybe there's a galaxy with a planet that's just a little more tilted, with a sun that shines just a little bit darker, and that's where I'm supposed to be, where it somehow makes sense to feel this broken.”
― Amy Reed, Crazy

“Even though I'm sleeping again, everything still feels a little rickety, like I'm here but not quite here, like I'm just a stand-in for my real self, like someone could just reach over and pinch me and I'd deflate. I thought I was feeling better, but I don't know anymore.”
― Amy Reed, Crazy

“Do you remember? Do you remember being solid? Do you remember life before the hole? Before you were empty and needed to be filled? There was a time when everything was enough. There was a time you didn't try to get out of your own skin. Remember?”
― Amy Reed, Clean

“Silence does not mean yes. No can be thought and felt but never said. It can be screamed silently on the inside. It can be in the wordless stone of a clenched fist, fingernails digging into palm. Her lips sealed. Her eyes closed. His body just taking, never asking, never taught to question silence”
― Amy Reed, The Nowhere Girls

“Maybe this is all love is and all it will ever be-- boys fucking girls and pretending it's love, girls getting fucked and pretending they like it, saying "I love you, too," and wanting to throw up.”
― Amy Reed, Beautiful

“You act like you're invincible, but I know deep down you want someone to hold your hand and buy you flowers and look you in the eye and tell you you're his soul mate. You want someone who will love every piece of you, even the pieces you can't love yourself.”
― Amy Reed, Crazy

“And that's when it hits me, the punch in the stomach, the carving out of my insides. That's when I realize that none of this is a movie. I will not go out with a bang. There is no ending. There are no credits. I will wake up and I will keep waking up and this will always be waiting for me.”
― Amy Reed, Beautiful

“Nothing made me the way I am. Nothing but me.”
― Amy Reed, Clean

“The things is,” Rosina says, “people don’t want to hear something that’ll make their lives more difficult, even if it’s the truth. People hate having to change the way they see things. So instead of admitting the world is ugly, they shit on the messenger for telling them about it.”
― Amy Reed, The Nowhere Girls

“Before there was Cocaine or vodka or sex or any of that, there was fantasy. There was escape. That was my first addiction. I remember being a little kid and imagining everything different, myself different. How did I get the idea in my head at age eight that everything was better somewhere else? Why would a child have a hole inside that can't get full no matter what she does? The real world could never make me happy, so I retreated to the world inside my head. And as I grew, as the real world proved itself more and more painful, the fantasy world expanded.”
― Amy Reed, Clean

“If you are still, no one can hurt you. If you play dead, there is nothing to kill.”
― Amy Reed, Beautiful

“But just because she's not helpless doesn't mean she doesn't need help.”
― Amy Reed, The Nowhere Girls

“I said just let me try one more time and she said, "THAT'S ENOUGH, ISABEL," again, and she could just say it over and over and it would never get through my thick skull because I'm always wanting and wanting because nothing is ever enough you are never enough I am never enough I am never enough I AM NEVER ENOUGH.”
― Amy Reed, Crazy

“Do you remember? Do you remember the world before the poison?”
― Amy Reed, Clean

“It feels like the ground is breathing and the air has hands, like everything is moving except me, like I am the only thing solid, like it is the rest of the world that is dizzy.”
― Amy Reed, Beautiful

“There is a picture of me in their heads, a picture of someone I don't know yet. She is not the chubby girl with the braces and bad perm. She is not the girl hiding in the bathroom at recess. She is someone new, a blank slate they have named beautiful. That is what I am now: beautiful, with this new body and face and hair and clothes. Beautiful, with this erasing of history.”
― Amy Reed, Beautiful

“What if I can't ever be who you want me to be? What if I keep letting you down?”
― Amy Reed, Crazy

“You never heard me tell you that I want everything, not just the perfect pieces, not just the sparkling, charming snapshots of you. You never let me tell you that I want every piece of you, even the broken ones, even the dark places where scary things hide.”
― Amy Reed, Crazy

“Sometimes I think you don't really believe the things you say; you just like the sound of yourself having opinions.”
― Amy Reed, Crazy

“One small kindness in a sea of cruelty, one word of truth among lies, these are the seeds that can change the world.”
― Amy Reed, The Nowhere Girls

“I don't know if anyone can ever really explain why they believe in someone. But I do. I believe in you. I hope that's worth something.”
― Amy Reed, Crazy

“Shirley: "Christopher, would you like to tell Olivia what "F.I.N.E" means?"

Christopher: "Fucked-up, Insecure, Neurotic, and Emotional"
...

Olivia: "But what if you really do feel fine?"

Shirley: "Christopher, care to answer that?"

Christopher: "Um, there's no such feeling as fine.”
― Amy Reed, Clean

“They are ghosts of people I never knew, which the rain will wash away.”
― Amy Reed, Beautiful

“I want to crush my cigarette on his eyelid. I would rather he keep fucking me for the rest of the night than lie here staring at me tracing my ribs with his fingertips, acting like what happened meant something.”
― Amy Reed, Beautiful

“But Erin has empathy, lots of it, so much it hurts sometimes, so much that other people's pain turns into her own pain and makes her completely incapable of doing anything useful for anyone. That's why it's easier to avoid it than to engage. It's easier to try to ignore it than try to comfort whoever's hurting, because usually that backfires and makes things worse.”
― Amy Reed, The Nowhere Girls