Monica Hesse > Quotes

“My heart will still ache sometimes. Maybe more often than not. I think it's possible to be healed without feeling whole.”
― Monica Hesse, Girl in the Blue Coat

“But when it comes down to it, we all die alone.”
― Monica Hesse, Girl in the Blue Coat

“Maybe we can't barter our feelings away, trading good deeds for bad ones and expecting to become whole.”
― Monica Hesse, Girl in the Blue Coat

“When things come to an end in a way you didn't expect, in a way you never could have imagined, do they really come to an end? Does it mean you should keep searching, for better answers, for ones that don't keep you up at night? Or does it mean it's time to make peace?”
― Monica Hesse, Girl in the Blue Coat

“Sometimes hope can be poisonous.”
― Monica Hesse, Girl in the Blue Coat

“I would care that someone understood we were flawed and scarred and doing the best we could in this war. We were wrapped up in things that were so much bigger than ourselves. We didn't know. We didn't mean to. It wasn't our fault.”
― Monica Hesse, Girl in the Blue Coat

“Girls in love will do desperate and creative things.”
― Monica Hesse, Girl in the Blue Coat

“Isn't love the opposite of rational?”
― Monica Hesse, Girl in the Blue Coat

“Choose to love.”
― Monica Hesse, They Went Left

“None of these are the miracles I was looking for. But they’re miracles nonetheless”
― Monica Hesse, They Went Left

“But I supposed love doesn't stop, even in wars.”
― Monica Hesse

“Here is the thing about my grief: It’s like a very messy room in a house where the electricity has gone out.”
― Monica Hesse, Girl in the Blue Coat

“Tow best friends meeting on the street to say so many things at once: I betrayed you, I love you, I want to save you, I'm sorry. All around Europe, people are dying by the hundreds of thousands. And here, in my city, the Nazis slaughtered a family because of events that started with love and jealousy and a slip of the tongue.”
― Monica Hesse, Girl in the Blue Coat

“The absence of pain is not the same as the presence of happiness".”
― Monica Hesse, They Went Left

“Lucky has become such a relative term, when the standards to meet it involve only not being treated like a criminal in your own home city.”
― Monica Hesse, Girl in the Blue Coat

“let go of a friend I’ll still miss every day. I’ll go back to work. I’ll get better. I’ll get better slowly. I’ll find all the secret, hidden things.”
― Monica Hesse, Girl in the Blue Coat

“I found a girl who wasn't the girl I was looking for. I let go of a friend I'll still miss every day. I'll go back to work. I'll get better. I'll get better slowly. I'll find all the secret, hidden things.”
― Monica Hesse, Girl in the Blue Coat

“Maybe we can’t barter our feelings away, trading good deeds for bad ones and expecting to become whole.”
― Monica Hesse, Girl in the Blue Coat

“We need girls who are pretty so the soldiers don’t notice that they’re also smart and brave and working against them”
― Monica Hesse, Girl in the Blue Coat

“And you don't have to cry about that boy. Boys are silly. The first thing you need is a best friend.”
― Monica Hesse, Girl in the Blue Coat

“Fear. That’s right. That was the odor I couldn’t place before. That’s the smell of my beautiful, breaking country.”
― Monica Hesse, Girl in the Blue Coat

“But I suppose love doesn't stop, even in wars. There's only so much time a day that you can spend being terrified of something before your instinct to feel natural human emotions would kick in.”
― Monica Hesse, Girl in the Blue Coat

“Then you know. You know what it's like to love someone like you love yourself and lose them.”
― Monica Hesse

“And now we're supposed to live with people who either wished for our deaths or looked the other way while it happened.”
― Monica Hesse, They Went Left

“We were wrapped up in things that were so much bigger than ourselves. We didn’t know. We didn’t mean it. It wasn’t our fault.”
― Monica Hesse, Girl in the Blue Coat

“Can I understand? Was leaving enough? Was deserting enough? What would I consider enough? Would I have asked him to shoot his superior officers before he deserted? Go into hiding rather than enlist at all? Try to spy for the Allies? What's the minimum expectation I have for human decency in a war the was entirely inhumane?”
― Monica Hesse, They Went Left

“What's the minimum expectation I have for human decency in a war that was entirely inhumane?”
― Monica Hesse, They Went Left

“It is the greatest tragedy and the greatest beauty of a relationship: that at some level, the person you are closest to will always be a total friggin' mystery.”
― Monica Hesse, American Fire: Love, Arson, and Life in a Vanishing Land

“This was not the story of Accomack. This was the story of America. In 1910, back in the peak of the Eastern Shore’s wealth, more than 70 percent of Americans lived in rural counties. It was the norm, it was the standard. Now, rural counties contained only 15 percent of the nation’s population.”
― Monica Hesse, American Fire: Love, Arson, and Life in a Vanishing Land

“...and then we walked to get ice cream, in a relationship at its beautiful beginning, in a world that was closer to the end than we ever knew.”
― Monica Hesse, Girl in the Blue Coat