Julie Johnson > Quotes

“No amount of soul searching would fix my past. There was no magical Band-Aid I could stick on my heart, no special glue I could use to make myself whole again. I had shattered to pieces like a fragile vase on concrete; some fragments could be roughly cobbled back together, but many of my vital parts had simply turned to dust, pulverized and scattered by the first gust of wind.”
― Julie Johnson, Like Gravity

“Maybe there aren’t any happily ever afters, or white knights who ride in on valiant steeds to save the day. Maybe, in real life, Prince Charming isn’t always perfect – he’s just as flawed as everyone else in the tale. And that princess, alone in her tower? She’s not perfect either. Birds don’t braid her hair every morning, she can’t serenade wild forest creatures into servitude, and she doesn’t even own a ball gown. But she’s also smart enough to know not to accept poisoned apples from strangers, or prick her finger on deadly spindles.

She doesn’t wait around for a prince to charge in and slay the dragon. Maybe she saves herself and in the end, rides off into her own goddamned sunset.”
― Julie Johnson, Like Gravity

“Being heartbroken doesn’t mean you stop feeling. Just the opposite — it means you feel it all more.
With your heart in fragments, every sensation is sharper, every emotion more acute. Your feelings are enhanced, like a blind man with an impeccable sense of smell, or a deaf woman whose eyes can perceive things a normal person would never recognize.
The brokenhearted are the best empaths of all.”
― Julie Johnson, Erasing Faith

“Grief is a kick in the chest. It steals your breath, hits you so hard you think you’ll never stand back up again. And it’s not just because you’re grieving death or heartbreak or loss – you’re grieving change. You’re grieving the life that might have been, if it hadn’t all gotten fucked up along the way.”
― Julie Johnson, Like Gravity

“We were doomed from the start. A lost cause. A losing battle. And yet, in that narrow instant, I didn't give a single fuck.”
― Julie Johnson, Erasing Faith

“People say love isn’t supposed to be painful. But maybe the best things in life are the ones that hurt the most after they’re gone.”
― Julie Johnson, Say the Word

“Did you ever stop to think that even if I am a monster, I might be your soulmate anyway?”
― Julie Johnson, Erasing Faith

“Maybe instead, I wanted the kind of love that devastates you. The kind that rips your insides open and leaves you gutted, out in the cold. Maybe I wanted that great, epic, once-in-a-lifetime love, that consumes with the brightest of flames. And maybe, even though I knew the hottest fires often burn out the fastest, even though it couldn’t last… it was worth it.
People say love isn’t supposed to be painful. But maybe the best things in life are the ones that hurt the most after they’re gone.”
― Julie Johnson, Say the Word

“The way I see it, everyone’s been telling the story wrong. I mean, take Cinderella, for example. She never asked for a Prince, let alone waited around for one. Hell, all she ever wanted was a night off from work and a fancy dress to twirl in for a few hours. It’s never made sense to me that I’m supposed to sit around pining for some mythical Prince Charming to get off his ass and rescue me. If that’s the grand game plan, I could end up waiting forever. Because, I mean, if he’s anything like the rest of the male population, the prince is probably stuck in traffic somewhere, or got lost along the way and is too damn stubborn to ask for directions.”
― Julie Johnson, Not You It's Me

“A boy made of stardust and selfishness; a girl filled with fire and fury at the world. We are a tangle of emotional wreckage, two broken messes thrown together, trying to navigate something we can barely comprehend.”
― Julie Johnson, The Monday Girl

“Regret was an emotional cancer, destroying you from the inside out. Eating at your most vital parts until there was nothing left but scar tissue and sorrow. It chipped away at you in small increments, shattering your defenses and tiring you out. But, unlike a physical cancer, which might eventually go into remission or be cut out with a few careful strokes of a surgeon’s scalpel, regret would stay with you forever. It was chronic, but not terminal — a constant companion that would haunt you until your deathbed. And there were no cures to diminish its influence. No salves to counteract its effects.
Regret didn’t break your body. It crushed your spirit.
Mine had just been broken beyond repair.”
― Julie Johnson, Say the Word

“Nate and me... we aren't built for truces, for good times, for light jokes and giggles. We're meant for the shadows. For the dirty, ugly, secret parts of our souls, the parts we can't hide because we know each other too well.”
― Julie Johnson, Cross the Line

“I’ve loved you since the first moment I clapped eyes on you in Latin class. Since that day in the rain, when you climbed into my car and slipped my sweater over your head to get warm. Since the first time I watched you with Jamie, laughing and joking even though the weight of the world was on your shoulders. Since I saw you running in crazy, breathless circles around the circumference of my favorite tree, a look of absolute joy on your face.” He traced a finger down my cheek. “I’ve loved you since before I even knew what love was.”
― Julie Johnson, Say the Word

“Being near you, Brooklyn…it’s like breathing. I don’t have a choice about it; I just have to do it or I know I won’t survive very long.”
― Julie Johnson, Like Gravity

“When you’ve spent your whole life not being good enough, it takes time to let yourself believe that you finally are. Self-worth isn’t a switch that flips inside you. It’s a daily struggle not to sabotage your own success. Not to cave into the voices inside your head that whisper you’re not good enough, or you’ll fuck things up, or that someone else could do things better than you.”
― Julie Johnson, The Monday Girl

“Home. It’s wherever I’m with you.”
― Julie Johnson, Like Gravity

“I think that if two people are meant to be together, nothing can ever truly separate them. Time, distance, other people — it doesn’t matter. They’ll circle back around to each other eventually.”
― Julie Johnson, Say the Word

“I’d learned some hard lessons in my life, but perhaps the most important one was that you have to cherish the insignificant moments you have with your most significant people. To hold onto the times when you’re happy. To smile often, and laugh loudly. To enjoy the ones you love, and hold them close to your heart while you still have them.”
― Julie Johnson, Say the Word

“I’d felt it – that moment when a person you need more than air or water or sustenance steps into your orbit and everything subtly shifts, like a camera finally sliding into focus. That person, who used to mean less than nothing, enters your life and rearranges your entire atmosphere around them, as if every atom and cell that makes you you isn’t your property anymore. Suddenly, every part of you becomes theirs – your particles dissembled and rearranged to align perfectly with someone who you don’t even know or understand yet. You cease to exist as you once were, and that person who meant nothing is suddenly, overwhelmingly, everything.”
― Julie Johnson, Say the Word

“I should’ve fought for you. Instead, I spent a long time blocking out every emotion I felt for you. And when I finally stopped being hurt and confused and headstrong, when I started to let feeling back in… six years had passed and I was alone, on the other side of the world, without the only person I’d ever wanted standing by my side.”
― Julie Johnson, Say the Word

“Well, in my experience, it's usually the things we're most afraid of that end up being the most worthwhile.”
― Julie Johnson, Like Gravity

“You think you can change a guy, that he’ll be different with you, that you’ll finally be the one to tame him… and before you know it, you’re alone in your underwear at nine o’clock on a Saturday night, crying to Adele songs, eating ice cream straight from the gallon, and wondering what the hell is the matter with you that you fell for such a goddamned man-child, after he explicitly warned you not to.”
― Julie Johnson, The Monday Girl

“When you walk away from your soul mate – when you take real, true love and throw it in the fire and watch as it burns down to ashes – you know you’ll never be the same again. The heart isn’t like the liver; it doesn’t regenerate, no matter how much time passes. Once it’s gone, it’s gone for good.”
― Julie Johnson, Say the Word

“There’ll be moments in life, sweet pea, that stand out in your memories like a photograph. Scenes captured perfectly in your mind, frozen in time with each detail as colorful as it was that first time you saw it. ‘Flashbulb memories,’ some people call them,” she’d told me, her eyes crinkling up and nearly disappearing in a face etched with too many laugh lines to count. “Most people don’t recognize those moments as they happen. They look back fifty years later, and realize that those were the most important parts of their entire life. But at the time, they’re so busy looking ahead to what’s coming down the line or worrying about their future, they don’t enjoy their present. Don’t be like them, sweet pea. Don’t get so caught up in chasing your dreams that you forget to live them.”
― Julie Johnson, Say the Word

“And we were a box of fireworks. A sixty-gallon drum of gasoline. An unstable container of napalm.
One spark, one look, was all it took.
We went up in flames.”
― Julie Johnson, Say the Word

“True friends don’t judge one another. They judge other people. Together.”
― Julie Johnson, Cross the Line

“Marriage (noun): betting someone half your stuff that you'll love them forever.”
― Julie Johnson, Like Gravity

“You’re my karma, sunshine. And I’m pretty sure you were made for me.”
― Julie Johnson, Not You It's Me

“Take a risk on messy. Live Fearlessly. Love recklessly. Most of all, just love.”
― Julie Johnson, Not You It's Me

“Everything will be okay in the end. If it's not okay, it's not the end.”
― Julie Johnson, Like Gravity