Leah Konen > Quotes

“I'm asking you to forget everything you know about True Love. The real kind doesn't make you selfish and shortsighted. Real love makes you better than you ever knew you could be.”
― Leah Konen, The Romantics

“You could love someone, you could pick the right person, you could give your life to them, and you could. Still. Get. Hurt.”
― Leah Konen, The Romantics

“Books are supposed to remind you that life is hard for everyone. That other people have it even worse than you. I know you know, that because you love reading as much as I do.”
― Leah Konen, Love and Other Train Wrecks

“Worth noting here is a common little mind trap that you humans frequently fall into: thinking much more about whether the other person likes you than whether you actually like them.”
― Leah Konen, The Romantics

“1. Romantic: One who ruthlessly believes in love in its finest form and impresses those feelings onto his or her various relationships. May result in scaring off partners, falling for the wrong person, and desperately trying to turn life into a movie with glamorous Old Hollywood actors. May also result in some of the best, most inspiring, and deepest relationships around.”
― Leah Konen, The Romantics

“Inspirational shit works a lot better, he mused, when your whole life isn’t already ruined.”
― Leah Konen, The Romantics

“In fact, it is quite possible that you think you've found me (love) when you haven't.”
― Leah Konen, The Romantics

“2. Adventurer: One who primarily seeks out a partner for life's adventures (and misadventures), and who doesn't feel the need for overly romantic gestures, saccharine phrases, or deep discussions about the future. May result in downplaying more serious emotions or situations in favor of "just seeing where it goes." May result in fun, fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants relationship that keeps both partners excited and fulfilled.”
― Leah Konen, The Romantics

“Everyone thinks their romance is classy AF. No one sits there comparing their coupledom to the stuff of Lifetime movies. And no one thinks it will go away because, if you did, you'd never take a chance. Luckily, the human heart is not that logical.”
― Leah Konen, The Romantics

“Half the time, people just want to be assholes, so they call it rebellion. ”
― Leah Konen, The Romantics

“Maybe even though what they had was beautiful, it wasn't meant to last forever.”
― Leah Konen, The Romantics

“It happens to all of us,

What?

A broken heart.”
― Leah Konen

“The two strangers got to the waffle station at exactly the same time. (I swear I’m like an award-winning orchestra conductor sometimes.)

Cara poured a ladleful of regular batter onto her machine, while Sammy poured her own ladle and grabbed the container of chocolate chips.

Wait for it . . .

Wait for it . . .

“Shit!” Sammy stared at the mountain of chocolate now piled up on the batter. The cap of the container had come off completely and rolled along the floor right into Cara’s feet.

“Oh my god, let me help you!” Cara sprung to action, as I knew she would, grabbing a broom and dustpan that I’d placed nearby and cleaning up the chips on the floor.

“Oh, you don’t have to,” Sammy stammered. “I’m sorry—I don’t know how that happened.”

Cara swept the chips into the dustpan and surveyed Sammy’s half-cooked waffle, which was now completely coated in messy, gooey chocolate. “I mean, I love chocolate as much as the next girl, but even that’s a little much for me.”

Sammy laughed, then fiddled with the container in her hand. “I think some dick unscrewed the top so they’d all fall out.” She rolled her eyes. “College boys.” (Or metaphysical entities. Either one.)

“Wow, what an asshole,” Cara said. “People are such idiots.”
― Leah Konen, The Romantics

“It makes me feel free, like I could get lost in the woods and live my best life or something.”
― Leah Konen, Love and Other Train Wrecks

“What people didn’t get about tragedy, people who hadn’t yet had the privilege of going through it, is that it could be so casual. When bad news came, it was never like the movies. No dramatic score building to a crescendo. No slow pan of the camera. It struck out of nowhere—a midday phone call while you were at work. A sentence uttered—“It’s probably fine”—that would replay henceforth on a loop.”
― Leah Konen, The Perfect Escape

“She looked at him all serious, and Gael swore even her freckles looked like they weren’t messing around. ”
― Leah Konen, The Romantics

“Love is messy. I want that.”
― Leah Konen, The Romantics

“So in case you were wondering, I had no idea her friend was you,” Gael said. “I wouldn’t have tried to rope you into babysitting, I promise.”

“I believe you,” Sammy said. “Don’t worry. We’re hardly even friends, really, I just met her yesterday—ooh, look,” she squealed, interrupting herself. “There’s a baby elephant!”

Gael laughed. “I wouldn’t have expected you to go ape-shit for baby animals.”

Sammy raised an eyebrow. “Name one person with a soul who doesn’t go apeshit for baby animals. They’re, like, animals who are tiny. Who are you, the devil?”

Gael shook his head. “I like them, too. Obviously. But your voice went about a million levels higher just then.”

Sammy crossed her arms. “Maybe you should question your ability to maintain an even tone of voice in the face of”—she smiled one of those weird upside-down smiles that little kids do when they’re excited—“BABY ELEPHANTS.”
― Leah Konen, The Romantics

“So what’s your favorite horror movie?” she asked.

“Easy,” Gael said. “The Birds.” Not even its recent association with Anika could quell his love for the masterpiece.

“Umm, The Birds totally doesn’t count as horror.”

“Of course it does!” Gael ventured a sip of his hot chocolate, but it was still too hot. “What are you talking about?”

“No one even dies,” Sammy protested. “You can’t have a horror movie without at least one death.”

“The schoolteacher dies,” Gael said.

Sammy rolled her eyes. “Fine, fine. Favorite slasher film, then. You know, where there’s a killer, and the killer is not, like, a pigeon.”

It was actually mainly crows and seagulls in The Birds, but Gael let that one slide. ”
― Leah Konen, The Romantics

“People don’t realize, when your world breaks apart, you’ll do anything for the chance to put it back together.”
― Leah Konen, The Perfect Escape

“Sus ojos son el hogar de plegarias silenciosas.”
― Leah Konen, Love and Other Train Wrecks

“No one ever thinks the world is going to implode, the ground sink right out from under where they’re standing, and that the one in however many thousand will ever apply to them.”
― Leah Konen, The Perfect Escape

“Anika’s hand in his felt natural, and the energy between them felt big and important, straight-up literary, like Tristan and Isolde. Cathy and Heathcliff. Romeo and Juliet.

But the thing that Gael forgot to remember was that, whether the author is Shakespeare, Emily Brontë, or whoever the hell wrote Tristan and Isolde, all of those stories have one thing in common:

They end badly.”
― Leah Konen, The Romantics

“It was infuriating, sure, that he’d been the one to screw everything up, and now he looked like he was having the time of his life.”
― Leah Konen, Love and Other Train Wrecks

“I’d thought love could conquer all. I didn’t know that love could be as selfish as anything else.”
― Leah Konen, The Perfect Escape

“Well, we’re happy for you, Gael,” Jenna said genuinely.

And he was happy, too.

Totally happy.

Pharrell-level happy.”
― Leah Konen, The Romantics

“I had to drown my sorrows with pop.”
― Leah Konen, Love and Other Train Wrecks

“I had a terrifying sense of standing on a knife’s edge and not wanting to fall off. A sense that what she was about to say was going to change everything. And this large part of me wanted to sit on this knife’s edge, make myself a home there, uncomfortable as it was,”
― Leah Konen, The Perfect Escape

“Half Moon Bay, California,”
― Leah Konen, Keep Your Friends Close

“Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them.”
― Leah Konen, The Last Room on the Left