Amy Zhang > Quotes

“Newton's laws of physics can rarely be applied to the real world. There is more to life than cause and effect. Things just aren't that simple”
― Amy Zhang

“I watched her carve her mistakes in stone, and they arranged themselves around her. They became a maze with walls that reached the sky.”
― Amy Zhang

“There had been silent tears and ones that barely leaked out. There were tears that heaved from her in great sobs. They all slipped through my fingers when I tried to catch them, and they fell around her in oceans.”
― Amy Zhang

“She needed a window, because she had broken her heart throwing it at locked doors.”
― Amy Zhang

“It wasn't the aloneness that Liz minded. It was the silence. It echoed.”
― Amy Zhang

“Liz Emerson held so much darkness within her that closing her eyes didn't make much a difference at all.”
― Amy Zhang

“Her world was almost beautiful. She didn't care that it was false.”
― Amy Zhang

“Out of the seven billion people sharing the planet with her, not one of them knew what was going through her head. Not one of them knew she was lost. Not one of them asked.”
― Amy Zhang

“He embraced his weirdness, and it was nice.”
― Amy Zhang

“Today the snow is white and swirling, the sky is close, and the world is so big and beautiful and infinite that we don't need to pretend. All we know is already perfect.”
― Amy Zhang

“The world is so big and beautiful and infinite that we don't need to pretend”
― Amy Zhang

“She wanted to be a little girl again, the one who thought getting high meant being pushed on the swings and pain was falling off her bike”
― Amy Zhang

“And it was then that he began to fall in love with her for the second time... because he believed in broken things.”
― Amy Zhang

“Funny things, aren't they? People, they only believe in what they could see. Appearances were all that mattered, and no one cared that she was breaking apart.”
― Amy Zhang

“Stay alive.
But she doesn't want to. She doesn't want to.”
― Amy Zhang

“On the first day of fifth grade, Liz was sitting on the swing beside Liam's at recess. Falling and flying, her hair fanned out behind her and her eyes were closed, and that was what had caught his attention, her closed eyes. She looked a little bit silly and very much alive, and Liam couldn't stop watching.

Liz, on her part, was aware that the boy beside her was watching, but she loved swinging too much to care what he thought. She loved the wind hitting her face and the brief moment of suspension at the top of the arc and the falling sensation that was magnified by the darkness of her eyelids. She imagined that she was a bird, an angel, a wayward star.

At the height of the arc, she let go. And she flew.

Liam watched with his mouth hanging wide open, expecting her to crumple on the asphalt and die tragically before his eyes.

She didn't, and when she walked away, Liam's heart followed.”
― Amy Zhang

“I don't need to keep my misanthropy in check. It runs wild.”
― Amy Zhang

“No one is strong enough to hold back so many tears”
― Amy Zhang

“She wanted to go back. She wanted to be a little girl again, the one who thought getting high meant being pushed on the swings and pain was falling off her bike.”
― Amy Zhang

“She knew so many people so many but what was the point? How many of them did she really care about? How many of them really cared about her?”
― Amy Zhang

“We fall asleep to fairy tales, and the world rotates and revolves and time passes and we grow up and we understand that they are false. There are not heroes and princesses and villains. It's not that easy.”
― Amy Zhang

“Had the world always been like this? Why had it seemed so much kinder when she was younger? Why had it seemed beautiful?”
― Amy Zhang

“It is then, when she releases her need to understand, that everything falls into place”
― Amy Zhang

“It is inconceivable that one day, her world will grow so dark and distant that when she raises her head, she will not be able to find it”
― Amy Zhang

“But she needed ice on the roads. She needed her accident to look as accidental as possible. And she just didn’t think she was capable of waiting another three months. Julia, however, knows none of this. She looks down at what remains of her best friend, and she thinks of all the times Liz was quiet and not really there. The times when she was the Liz everyone else knows, all snark and insanity, and the moments when she was the one that stared at invisible things and hadn’t truly smiled in a long time.”
― Amy Zhang

“Without each other, there wouldn't be much of a point, would there?”
― Amy Zhang

“In researching for my stupid senior project on apocalypses, the only thing I really found interesting was all of the different ways people think the world is going to end. I read Wikipedia pages and collected catastrophes. An enormous snake is going to swallow the world. Fire and brimstone is going to fall from the sky. Freezing. Flooding. Four horsemen and a whore. Falling stars and empty oceans.

It doesn't end like that, though.

What it actually feels like when the world explodes, the instant it explodes, is nothing.

The explosion doesn't hurt at all. It doesn't hurt until you hit the ground.”
― Amy Zhang

“What a night to forget.
What a night to remember.”
― Amy Zhang

“In this moment, she realizes what death really means. It means that she will never catch them.”
― Amy Zhang

“I land with my knees on either side of him and he yelps and my hair is in his face and we are tangled in his blankets, and his eyes are the first thing I remember understanding.”
― Amy Zhang