Elena > Elena's Quotes

“Nobody tells you how those nights that stand out in your memory—levee sunset nights, hurricane nights, first kiss nights, homesick sleepover nights, nights when you stood at your bedroom window and looked at the lilies one porch over and thought they would stand out, singular and crystallized, in your memory forever—they aren't really anything. They're everything, and they're nothing. They make you who you are, and they happen at the same time a twenty-three-year-old a million miles away is warming up some leftovers, turning in early, switching off the lamp. They're so easy to lose.”
― Casey McQuiston, One Last Stop

“You have fallen into the homoerotic queer girl friendship. It’s all cute at first, and then you catch feelings, and it’s impossible to tell if the joke flirting is actual flirting and if the platonic cuddling is romantic cuddling, and next thing you know, three years have gone by, and you’re obsessed with her, and you haven’t done anything about it because you’re too terrified to fuck up the friendship by guessing it wrong, so instead you send each other horny plausible deniability love letters until you’re both dead.”
― Casey McQuiston, One Last Stop

“Maybe I don’t know what fills it in yet, but I can look at the space around where I sit in the world, what creates that shape, and I can care about what it’s made of, if it’s good, if it hurts anyone, it makes people happy, if it makes me happy. And that can be enough for now.”
― Casey McQuiston, One Last Stop

“Here was her mother sitting down across from her, reaching for her hands and chafing them as if she were frozen. She felt the rub of her mother’s wedding ring against her skin, and her mother’s face swam into focus, her brown eyes full of the sharp worry of love, and Lily thought, You will never look at me like this again.”
― Malinda Lo, Last Night at the Telegraph Club

“I’m not supposed to let you in,” Jesper said. Brekker seemed unperturbed. “Why not?” “Because every time I do, you ask me to break the law.” A voice from behind Jesper said, “The problem isn’t that he asks, it’s that you always say yes.”
― Leigh Bardugo, Rule of Wolves

“None of this had been fated; none of it foretold. There had been no prophecies of a demon king or a dragon queen, a one-eyed Tailor, Heartrender twins. They were just the people who had shown up and managed to survive.
But maybe that was the trick of it: to survive, to dare to stay alive, to forge your own hope when all hope had run out.”
― Leigh Bardugo, Rule of Wolves

“You threw me to the crows, but it turns out I prefer them to you.”
― Madeline Miller, Circe

“Circe, he says, it will be all right. It is not the saying of an oracle or a prophet. They are words you might speak to a child. I listen to his breath, warm upon the night air, and somehow I am comforted. He does not mean it does not hurt. He does not mean we are not frightened. Only that: we are here. This is what it means to swim in the tide, to walk the earth and feel it touch your feet. This is what it means to be alive.”
― Madeline Miller, Circe

“There was this one weekend, a million summers ago, when I sat on the shore drinking a frozen limeade, and I realized the only thing I wanted to look at was the way the sun hit the girls swimming in the lake.
The problem has always been this: When I look at you, I taste lime, and I see light on water.”
― Casey McQuiston, I Kissed Shara Wheeler

“There's a girl with brown eyes who reminds me of the first book I ever loved. When I look at her, I feel like there might be another universe in her. I imagine her on a shelf too high for me to reach, or peeking out of someone else's backpack, or at the end of a long wait at the library. I know there are other books that are easier to get my hands on, but none are half as good as her. Every part of her seems to have a purpose, a specific meaning, an exact reason for being how and what and where it is.”
― Casey McQuiston, I Kissed Shara Wheeler

“I wish I could be as subtle and beautiful. All I know how to do is scream.”
― Alice Oseman, Radio Silence

“There are days when she mourns the prospect of another year, another decade, another century. There are nights when she cannot sleep, moments when she lies awake and dreams of dying.
But then she wakes, and sees the pink and orange dawn against the clouds, or hears the lament of a lone fiddle, the music and the melody, and remembers there is such beauty in the world.
And she does not want to miss it—any of it.”
― V.E. Schwab, The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue

“And then he whispers three words into her hair. “I love you,” he says, and Addie wonders if this is love, this gentle thing. If it is meant to be this soft, this kind. The difference between heat, and warmth. Passion, and contentment. “I love you too,” she says. She wants it to be true.”
― V.E. Schwab, The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue

“I was scared of you. Being around you, it was like—you were everything I wasn’t supposed to want. You’re—no one told me about you. When I was growing up, it was always, ‘One day, when you meet a nice boy,’ or, ‘When you have a husband….’ No one ever told me that it might be different. That it would be okay to be different.”
― Kelly Quindlen, Her Name in the Sky

“You know why people pair up into couples? Because being a human is fucking terrifying. But it's a hell of a lot easier if you're not doing it by yourself.”
― Alice Oseman, Loveless

“Rooney dropped to her knees. ‘Georgia, I am never going to stop being your friend. And I don’t mean that in the boring average meaning of ‘friend’ where we stop talking regularly when we’re twenty-five because we’ve both met nice young men and gone off to have babies, and only get to meet up twice a year. I mean I’m going to pester you to buy a house next door to me when we’re forty-five and have finally saved up enough for our deposits. I mean I’m going to be crashing round yours every night for dinner because you know I can’t fucking cook to save my life, and if I’ve got kids and a spouse, they’ll probably come round with me, because otherwise they’ll be living on chicken nuggets and chips. I mean I’m going to be the one bringing you soup when you text me that you’re sick and can’t get out of bed and ferrying you to the doctor’s even when you don’t want to go because you feel guilty about using the NHS when you just have a stomach bug. I mean we’re gonna knock down the fence between our gardens so we have one big garden, and we can both get a dog and take turns looking after it. I mean I’m going to be here, annoying you, until we’re old ladies, sitting in the same care home, talking about putting on a Shakespeare because we’re all old and bored as shit.”
― Alice Oseman, Loveless

“People are really out there just … thinking about having sex all the time and they can’t even help it?’ I spluttered. ‘People have dreams about it because they want it that much? How the – I’m losing it. I thought all the movies were exaggerating, but you’re all really out there just craving genitals and embarrassment. This has to be some kind of huge joke.”
― Alice Oseman, Loveless

“Friends are automatically classed as 'less important' than romantic partners. I'd never questioned that. It was just the way the world was. I guess I'd always felt that friendship just couldn't compete with what a partner offered, and that I'd never really experience real love until I found romance.
But if that had been true, I probably wouldn't have felt like this.”
― Alice Oseman, Loveless

“I knew liking girls could be hard when you're also a girl. It usually was, at least for a while. But it was beautiful too. So fucking beautiful.
Liking girls when you're a girl was power. It was light. Hope. Joy. Passion.
Sometimes it took girls who liked girls a little while to find that. But when they found it, they flew.”
― Alice Oseman, Loveless

“It was something adults said all the time. "You'll change your mind when you're older. You never know what might happen. You'll feel differently one day." As if we teenagers knew so little about ourselves that we could wake up one day a completely different person. As if the person we are right now doesn't matter at all.”
― Alice Oseman, Loveless

“Oh well,' she said, patting my leg again, 'plenty of time, my love. Plenty of time.'
But my time is now, I wanted to scream. My life is happening right now.”
― Alice Oseman, Loveless

“And the worst part of it was—even though I'd longed for these things, I knew that they'd never make me happy anyway. The idea was beautiful. But the reality made me sick.
How could I feel so sad about giving up these things that I did not actually want?
I felt pathetic for getting sad about it. I felt guilty, knowing that there were people out there like me who were happy being like this.
I felt like I was grieving. I was grieving this fake life, a fantasy future that I was never going to live.”
― Alice Oseman, Loveless

“Am I in love with her already? Perhaps. Or maybe I’m just confusing love with comfort, and I’m okay with that. Is there any difference between love and a safe harbor from a storm? Should there be? There are a lot of different kinds of love, and though I may not be able to tell them apart from each other, I appreciate all of them the same.”
― Andrew Joseph White, The Spirit Bares Its Teeth

“I can't say if you're a good person or not. But the more I know of you, the more I understand that the world keeps making you choose between survival and martyrdom. No one should fault you for wanting to live.”
― Margaret Owen, Little Thieves