Ashley Hope Pérez > Quotes

“the dead are not always right. The dead are not saints. But the dead are ours. We carry them with us like it’s our job. And maybe it is.”
― Ashley Hope Pérez, Out of Darkness

“In the shade, the air smelled of true autumn.”
― Ashley Hope Pérez, Out of Darkness

“There are so many funerals that the pews in churches have no time to cool.”
― Ashley Hope Pérez, Out of Darkness

“carrying a name was a way of caring for those who’d given”
― Ashley Hope Pérez, Out of Darkness

“To touch her braid was to remember her mother. The code was simple: when her mother had a braid, she belonged to Naomi.”
― Ashley Hope Pérez, Out of Darkness

“He wrote until the story was there, outside him, terrible in its truth.”
― Ashley Hope Pérez, Out of Darkness

“They had been happy, for a time, before the rules found them. Before the terrible price was exacted for their transgressions. For the crossing of lines. For friendship, for love.”
― Ashley Hope Pérez, Out of Darkness

“Mrs. Garza made us read this poem in class that said “April is the cruelest month.” Everybody else thought that was stupid, how was a month going to be cruel? But to me it makes perfect sense. It’s cruel because the whole world turns pretty and green while everything in your life is going sour. And you can’t blame anybody but yourself.”
― Ashley Hope Pérez, What Can't Wait

“It wasn’t just that Muff had a radio and better cooking gear; the house had the warmth of a place where people were happy together and would go on being happy.”
― Ashley Hope Pérez, Out of Darkness

“She was the only pretty thing that every boy among us believed could be his, at least ten minutes at a time.”
― Ashley Hope Pérez, Out of Darkness

“So Naomi put the gun in the same category that held Henry’s Bible: things he owned but didn’t use anymore.”
― Ashley Hope Pérez, Out of Darkness

“I just sit there. I should be running after her, trying to patch things up, but the thing is that I’m scared to be in the rush of people in the hall. I can’t stand to feel all those bodies move against me. I don’t want anybody to touch me. Because there’s no way to know what they’re thinking, what they would do to you if there was nothing to stop them.”
― Ashley Hope Pérez, What Can't Wait

“The half-truth was that she had homework. The whole truth was
hidden in some inner pocket of her heart.”
― Ashley Hope Pérez, Out of Darkness

“that he’d gone all the way with her out back of the cafeteria. We didn’t believe him, but we liked”
― Ashley Hope Pérez, Out of Darkness

“Even the back of Cari’s neck looked mad.”
― Ashley Hope Pérez, Out of Darkness

“She knew how fast charm could turn cruel. She knew that men could take and take and leave the people who loved them wrecked or dead.”
― Ashley Hope Pérez, Out of Darkness

“He couldn’t simper around these fools and still be what he was becoming for Naomi. If
he had to burn bridges to be that man, he would.”
― Ashley Hope Pérez, Out of Darkness

“Beto and Cari sat in the booth leg to leg. They pressed wordless messages into each other’s hands under the table.”
― Ashley Hope Pérez, Out of Darkness

“I use words to transform pain, to dance away hate and injustice”
― Ashley Hope Pérez, Banned Together: Our Fight for Readers' Rights

“All kinds of forgetting were possible in the tree. Naomi could forget
the grime she scrubbed from the sinks, the slap of wet sheets against her
ankles as she flung them over the clothesline, the breakfasts and lunches
and dinners waiting to be made and eaten and cleaned up. She could forget the stares at school and Miranda’s icy words. Inside the tree, she could
forget the girl she saw Wash with at his house and the ones at Mason’s.
She could forget that Wash belonged to the twins first of all.”
― Ashley Hope Pérez, Out of Darkness

“As libraries become battlegrounds, teens notice which books, and which identities, are under attack. Those who share identities with targeted authors or characters receive a powerful message of exclusion: Those books don't belong, and neither do you.”
― Ashley Hope Pérez