Leah Raeder > Quotes

“Girls love each other like animals. There is something ferocious and unself-conscious about it. We don't guard ourselves like we do with boys. No one trains us to shield our hearts from each other. With girls, it's total vulnerability from the beginning. Our skin is bare and soft. We love with claws and teeth and the blood is just proof of how much. It's feral.

And it's relentless.”
― Leah Raeder, Black Iris

“...You should love something while you have it, love it fully and without reservation, even if you know you'll lose it someday. We lose everything. If you're trying to avoid loss, there's no point in taking another breath, or letting your heart beat one more time. It all ends." His fingers curl around mine. "That's all life is. Breathing in, breathing out. The space between two breaths.”
― Leah Raeder, Unteachable

“You can call it love, or you can call it freefall. They're pretty much the same thing.”
― Leah Raeder, Unteachable

“There are moments, when you’re getting to know someone, when you realize something deep and buried in you is deep and buried in them, too. It feels like meeting a stranger you’ve known your whole life.”
― Leah Raeder, Unteachable

“Who fixes broken people? Is it only other broken people, ones who've already been ruined? And do we need to be fixed? It was the messiness and hurt in our pasts that drove us, and that same hurt connected us at a subdermal level, the kind of scars written so deeply in your cells that you can't even see them anymore, only recognize them in someone else.”
― Leah Raeder, Unteachable

“I see the lights every night. It seems like the whole world has figured out how to be happy, but no one's letting me in on the secret.”
― Leah Raeder, Unteachable

“I respect people who get nerdy as fuck about something they love”
― Leah Raeder, Unteachable

“Part of falling in love with someone is actually falling in love with yourself. Realizing that you're gorgeous, you're fearless and unpredictable, you're a firecracker spitting light, entrancing a hundred faces that stare up at you with starry eyes.”
― Leah Raeder, Unteachable

“If I was gay, I wouldn't need an asterisk beside my name. I could stop worrying if the girl I like will bounce when she finds out I also like dick. I could have a coming-out party without people thinking I just want attention. I wouldn't have to explain that I fall in love with minds, not genders or body parts. People wouldn't say I'm 'just a slut' or 'faking it' or 'undecided' or 'confused.' I'm not confused. I don't categorize people by who I'm allowed to like and who I'm allowed to love. Love doesn't fit into boxes like that. It's blurry, slippery, quantum. It's only limited by our perceptions and before we slap a label on it and cram it into some category, everything is possible.”
― Leah Raeder, Black Iris

“I can't hold on to you. You're like a shooting star. Just a trail of fire in my hands.”
― Leah Raeder, Unteachable

“Falling for someone is like pulling a loose thread. It happens stitch by stitch. You feel whole most of the time even while the seams pop, the knots loosen, everything that holds you together coming undone. It feels incredible, this opening of yourself to the world. Not like the unraveling it is. Only afterward do you glance down at the tangle of string around your feet that used to be a person who was whole and self-contained and realize that love is not a thing that we create. It's an undoing.”
― Leah Raeder, Black Iris

“That's another thing about lies: if you convince yourself they're true, they become true. A lie is a discrepancy of belief, not fact.”
― Leah Raeder, Unteachable

“There's something so terrible about wanting something you've already had. You know exactly what you're missing. Your body knows precisely how to shape itself around the ache, the hollowness that wants to be filled”
― Leah Raeder, Unteachable

“I never wanted to be saved. I wanted someone to follow me down into the darkness.”
― Leah Raeder, Black Iris

“That is all life is. Breathing in, breathing out. The space between two breaths.”
― Leah Raeder, Unteachable

“The only way to cure an obsession is to become obsessed with something else.”
― Leah Raeder, Unteachable

“People know their feelings much sooner than they consciously accept them.”
― Leah Raeder, Unteachable

“...The thought of how much happiness lay scattered across the universe, unrealized, in fragments, waiting for the right twist of fate to bring it together.”
― Leah Raeder, Unteachable

“In a typical college romance novel, he'd be a gorgeous but troubled sex god who'd cure all my deep-seated psych issues with a good hard fuck. I'd smell his misogyny and abusive tendencies from miles off but my brain would turn to hormone soup because abs. That's the formula. Broken girl + bad boy = sexual healing. All you need to fix that tragic past is a six-pack. More problems? Add abs.

It's Magic Dick Lit.”
― Leah Raeder, Black Iris

“Maybe all you need to pull you back form the ledge is to know someone would miss you if you fell.”
― Leah Raeder, Black Iris

“Grow up. This is real. The world is ugly and nasty and fucked up, and so are we.”
― Leah Raeder, Unteachable

“I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul and all that jazz.”
― Leah Raeder, Unteachable

“You should love something while you have it, love it fully and without reservation, even if you know you’ll lose it someday.”
― Leah Raeder, Unteachable

“Why did everything beautiful come from pain?”
― Leah Raeder, Unteachable

“This is ridiculous," I said, trying to laugh it off. "I never cry at movies."

"Because you've never been in love," he said.”
― Leah Raeder, Unteachable

“I am not the heroine of this story.

And I'm not trying to be cute. It's the truth. I'm diagnosed borderline and seriously fucked-up. I hold grudges. I bottle my hate until it ferments into poison, and then I get high off the fumes. I'm completely dysfunctional and that's the way I like it, so don't expect a character arc where I finally find Redemption, Growth, and Change, or learn How to Forgive Myself and Others.”
― Leah Raeder, Black Iris

“Are you in love with him?”
I rolled my head on the plank to look at Wesley.
“I don’t think I know what being in love is yet. But this is different than anything I’ve ever felt.”
“What’s it feel like?”
“Remember when you thought I was jumping off to kill myself?”
He winced.
“It’s like that,” I said.
“But no one catches you. You’re just hanging over infinity.”
― Leah Raeder, Unteachable

“I'm not over you. I dream about you every night. I watch that fucking video over and over just to hear your voice. Does that make you happy? Is that proof I cared?”
― Leah Raeder, Unteachable

“Don’t come here to fuck with my head and play games. You don’t test someone’s love by leaving them.”
― Leah Raeder, Unteachable

“I can’t be your manic pixie dream girl. I can’t be the girl who teaches you how to open your heart and embrace life and all that bullshit, because I’m trying to figure out how to do that myself. I need a manic pixie dream boy of my own.”
― Leah Raeder, Unteachable