serena > serena's Quotes

“To every kid in Georgetown and in all “the Gardens” of the world: your voices matter, your dreams matter, your lives matter. Be roses that grow in the concrete.”
― Angie Thomas, The Hate U Give

“People like us in situations like this become hashtags, but they rarely get justice. I think we all wait for that one time though, that one time when it ends right.”
― Angie Thomas, The Hate U Give

“I love you and I love you and I love you, on battlefields, in shadows, in fading ink, on cold ice splashed with the blood of seals. In the rings of trees. In the wreckage of a planet crumbling to space. In bubbling water. In bee stings and dragonfly wings, in stars. In the deapths of lonely woods where I wandered in my youth, staring up - and even then you watched me. You slid back through my life, and I have known you since before I knew you.”
― Amal El-Mohtar, This Is How You Lose the Time War

“Her mother's voice rang in her ears: 'Don't capture their hearts. Steal their imagination. It's far more useful.”
― Roshani Chokshi, The Gilded Wolves

“At the end as at the start, and through all the in-betweens, I love you.”
― Amal El-Mohtar, This Is How You Lose the Time War

“You can destroy wood and brick, but you can't destroy a movement.”
― Angie Thomas, The Hate U Give

“Intentions always look better on paper than in reality.”
― Angie Thomas, The Hate U Give

“History is a myth shaped by the tongues of conquerors.”
― Roshani Chokshi, The Gilded Wolves

“Pac said Thug Life stood for 'The Hate U Give Little Infants Fucks Everybody'.”
― Angie Thomas, The Hate U Give

“There’s a kind of time travel in letters, isn’t there? I imagine you laughing at my small joke; I imagine you groaning; I imagine you throwing my words away. Do I have you still? Do I address empty air and the flies that will eat this carcass? You could leave me for five years, you could return never—and I have to write the rest of this not knowing.”
― Amal El-Mohtar, This Is How You Lose the Time War

“Once you've seen how broken someone is it's like seeing them naked—you can't look at them the same anymore.”
― Angie Thomas, The Hate U Give

“It's dope to be black until it's hard to be black.”
― Angie Thomas, The Hate U Give

“It doesn't matter how beautiful the cage is. It's still a prison.”
― Natasha Ngan, Girls of Paper and Fire

“But I don’t want an easy life. I want a meaningful one.”
― Natasha Ngan, Girls of Paper and Fire

“Make yourself a myth and live within it, so that you belong to no one but yourself.”
― Roshani Chokshi, The Gilded Wolves

“Because if this is to be my fate, I'm going to walk boldly into it on my own two feet.”
― Natasha Ngan, Girls of Paper and Fire

“Once upon a time there was a hazel-eyed boy with dimples. I called him Khalil. The world called him a thug.
He lived, but not nearly long enough, and for the rest of my life I'll remember how he died.
Fairy tale? No. But I'm not giving up on a better ending.”
― Angie Thomas, The Hate U Give

“Wolves were everywhere. In politics, on thrones, in beds. They cut their teeth on history and grew fat on war.”
― Roshani Chokshi, The Gilded Wolves

“I love you. I love you. I love you. I'll write it in waves. In skies. In my heart. You'll never see, but you will know. I'll be all the poets, I'll kill them all and take each one's place in turn, and every time love's written in all the strands it will be to you.”
― Amal El-Mohtar, This Is How You Lose the Time War

“Brynne shuddered. 'You're my best friend, but I would never like you. One, because you're basically my brother. Two, I prefer boys who can beat me in a wrestling contest.' She thought about this and added, 'Or girls.”
― Roshani Chokshi, Aru Shah and the Song of Death

“Books are letters in bottles, cast into the waves of time, from one person trying to save the world to another.”
― Amal El-Mohtar, This Is How You Lose the Time War

“Dead kids are put on pedestals, but mentally ill kids get hidden under the rug.”
― Neal Shusterman, Challenger Deep

“I can't change where I come from or what I've been through, so why should I be ashamed of what makes me, me?”
― Angie Thomas, The Hate U Give

“I want to be a body for you. I want to chase you, find you, I want to be eluded and teased and adored; I want to be defeated and victorious—I want you to cut me, sharpen me. I want to drink tea beside you in ten years or a thousand. Flowers grow far away on a planet they’ll call Cephalus, and these flowers bloom once a century, when the living star and its black-hole binary enter conjunction.I want to fix you a bouquet of them, gathered across eight hundred thousand years, so you can draw our whole engagement in a single breath, all the ages we’ve shaped together.”
― Amal El-Mohtar, This Is How You Lose the Time War

“When you are who they expect you to be, they never look too closely. If you're furious, let it be fuel.”
― Roshani Chokshi, The Gilded Wolves

“That's the problem. We let people say stuff, and they say it so much that it becomes okay to them and normal for us. What's the point of having a voice if you're gonna be silent in those moments you shouldn't be?”
― Angie Thomas, The Hate U Give

“I don't want to be their equal. I don't want them to look us in the eye. I want them to look away, to blink harshly, as if they'd stared at the sun itself. I don't want them standing across from us. I want them kneeling.”
― Roshani Chokshi, The Gilded Wolves

“I don't want an easy life. I want a meaningful one.”
― Natasha Ngan, Girls of Paper and Fire

“We might be Paper Girls, easily torn and written upon. The very title we’re given suggests that we are blank, waiting to be filled. But what the Demon King and his court do not understand is that paper is flammable.”
― Natasha Ngan, Girls of Paper and Fire

“They can take and break and steal all they want, but there is one thing they have no control over. Our emotions. Our feelings. Our thoughts. None of them will ever be able to control the way we feel. Our minds and hearts are our own. That is our power, Nine. Never forget it.”
― Natasha Ngan, Girls of Paper and Fire