Rebecca Podos > Quotes

“You get older, and you make your choices, and one by one the doors shut.”
― Rebecca Podos, The Mystery of Hollow Places

“Family isn't blood, necessarily; it's a thousand little choices we make every day. We choose to trust each other and forgive each other and go to the pasta place for dinner even though some of us would rather eat sushi.”
― Rebecca Podos, The Mystery of Hollow Places

“It’s hard to trust a resource written in Comic Sans.”
― Rebecca Podos, From Dust, a Flame

“But if there's one thing Dad's bad times have taught me, it's this: I never, ever want to have anything I can't survive without.”
― Rebecca Podos, The Mystery of Hollow Places

“Time went by and there wasn’t even sadness.
“You know how another patient put it? She said this feeling inside her was . . . it was anti-feeling. Like a black hole in space, and everything—happiness, anger, hope, meaning—it would all get sucked in, tipped over the event horizon, and she couldn’t feel any of it. That’s the way it was for me. I walked around like everyone else, and had this wonderful opportunity at the museum, and came home to this brilliant guy who loved me and was nothing but sweet. Your father tried so hard. But I felt . . . empty. If I could’ve filled that space up with anything, I would’ve. If somebody had turned to me and said, ‘It’s easy, just pour some dry cement in there and you’ll be a normal human girl,’ I would’ve done it like that.” She snaps her fingers. “But I couldn’t. And your father couldn’t do it for me.”
― Rebecca Podos, The Mystery of Hollow Places

“Surely a story still meant something, even after it had ended.”
― Rebecca Podos, The Wise and the Wicked

“I throw the car into drive, and once we're moving forward again, I feel tough. Which is exactly what I want to be. Tough means strong. It means even if you're sad - or god forbid, lonely - you won't crumble like a dry granola bar in the bottom of a backpack, destined to spill out over the lap of the first person who fumbles open your foil wrapper. Tough is the opposite of troubled waters.”
― Rebecca Podos, The Mystery of Hollow Places

“…she let slip that she was born in a black farmhouse besieged on all sides by wildflowers. That’s just how she described it—as if she’d spent her childhood there at war with the earth itself. Like battalions of flowers broke themselves against the gutters, pressed their seed heads to the windows, bruised their petals trying to squeeze beneath the doors.”
― Rebecca Podos, From Dust, a Flame

“But, um"--she squints over at me--"if I looked like a boy when we met, like if I was a boy then, would you still have wanted me?"

To make her laugh, I almost joke about my failed seduction of her doppelgänger brother, but stop myself. Leigh deserves much better than that, and needs me to be better. So I tell her what I've decided. "We're not just our bodies, right? You'd still be you.”
― Rebecca Podos, Like Water

“Instead, she stared at the toes of her mother’s boots and tried to feel hatred. Mostly, she felt tired.”
― Rebecca Podos, The Wise and the Wicked

“And maybe witches didn’t get to lead long or happy lives...not unless they took them.”
― Rebecca Podos

“It's not that sex is so different with Leigh. Okay, obviously it's different. To have the same bits and parts and still fit together so well?”
― Rebecca Podos, Like Water

“I will visit, and we will speak of our childhoods, and drink tea to help us remember the best and oldest of times.”
― Rebecca Podos, The Wise and the Wicked

“That was good. Ruby wanted Cece to believe her. She wanted to believe herself, too.”
― Rebecca Podos, The Wise and the Wicked

“I sell tea to Americans, promising them better health, calmer sleep, peaceful hearts.”
― Rebecca Podos, The Wise and the Wicked

“Fairytales weren’t just important to her family, they were history.”
― Rebecca Podos

“I don't know what it means, exactly. This is all I know: I'm Savannah Espinoza, I'm eighteen years old, and Leigh Clemente is my best kiss yet”
― Rebecca Podos, Like Water

“I’m such a klutz.”
― Rebecca Podos, Fools In Love: Fresh Twists on Romantic Tales

“I loved the girl I could've been in the next-door dimension where one tiny butterfly of a thing is different. But this is the world we have, and this is the girl I am. So I just say, "I want to.”
― Rebecca Podos, Like Water

“I get closing up your heart because you're afraid to look inside and find out it's hollow. I get choosing to be alone because you're afraid that if the choice is out of your hands, you'll simply be lonely, and alone is okay, it's almost cool in a way. But lonliness isn't just being alone.”
― Rebecca Podos, The Mystery of Hollow Places

“But they left their greatest secrets behind, and by the time they’d crossed the ocean, they had become shadows of themselves, believing it better to be small and safe than strong and hunted.”
― Rebecca Podos, The Wise and the Wicked

“But I left everything I loved and everyone who loved me and I learned how big and strange the word really is. You’d be amazed.”
― Rebecca Podos, The Wise and the Wicked

“Ruby felt anxious all the time, her muscles tight and her brain cranked up to eleven. So tonight, she’d chosen comfort over adventure.”
― Rebecca Podos, The Wise and the Wicked

“I imagine my heart in my chest. I imagine prying it open with a chisel and rock hammer, and once it splits down the seam I push out everyone, one by one. I fit the halves back together after them and tell myself I'll learn to love the quiet they leave behind.”
― Rebecca Podos, The Mystery of Hollow Places

“You’re a kid, Ruby. You think a small, happy life is this terrible, wasted thing, like I did. But you’ll grow up. You’ll learn too.”
― Rebecca Podos, The Wise and the Wicked

“Stop it, okay, you guys? We can’t talk about this now. Any of it. Everybody’s sad tonight. Everyone’s scared. Let’s just keep it together.”
― Rebecca Podos, The Wise and the Wicked

“This is a story,” she’d say every night in their childhood bedroom, “but it is also true.”
― Rebecca Podos, The Wise and the Wicked

“I am miserable and joyful and in such pain, and I am becoming who I am meant to be. Above all, I am in love. I have been waiting my whole long, short life to feel a love like this”
― Rebecca Podos, The Wise and the Wicked