Thanh Thanh > Thanh's Quotes

“She peels an orange, separates it in perfect halves, and gives one of them to me. If I could wear it like a friendship bracelet, I would. Instead I swallow it section by section and tell myself it means even more this way. To chew and to swallow in silence here with her. To taste the same thing in the same moment.”
― Nina LaCour, We Are Okay

“How it's so easy for her to not feel anything at all, to be just completely gone, to not be around to see how fucked up she's made me. She got to disappear completely and I feel like I'm about to combust.”
― Nina LaCour, Hold Still

“The sun stopped shining for me is all. The whole story is: I am sad. I am sad all the time and the sadness is so heavy that I can't get away from it. Not ever.”
― Nina LaCour, Hold Still

“My room is so quiet and empty it hurts.”
― Nina LaCour, Hold Still

“I was okay just a moment ago. I will learn how to be okay again.”
― Nina LaCour, We Are Okay

“We were nostalgic for a time that wasn't yet over.”
― Nina LaCour, We Are Okay

“dear today,

i spend all of you pretending i'm okay when i'm not, pretending i'm happy when i'm not, pretending about everything to everyone.”
― Nina LaCour, Hold Still

“The trouble with denial is that when the truth comes, you aren't ready.”
― Nina LaCour, We Are Okay

“I wonder if there's a secret current that connects people who have lost something. Not in the way that everyone loses something, but in the way that undoes your life, undoes your self, so that when you look at your face it isn't yours anymore.”
― Nina LaCour, We Are Okay

“My best friend is dead, and I could have saved her. It’s so wrong so completely and painfully wrong, that I walked through my front door tonight smiling.”
― Nina LaCour, Hold Still

“That's what friends do: they notice things. They're there for each other. They see what parents don't.”
― Nina LaCour, Hold Still

“And I think of how time passes so differently for different people.”
― Nina LaCour, We Are Okay

“I was so blinded by her talent that I didn't recognize the tremendous pain behind her work. She gave me hundreds of images, so many chances to see that she was in trouble. I failed her.”
― Nina LaCour

“He wipes tears off my face and then snot. He uses his hands. He loves me that much.”
― Nina LaCour, Hold Still

“There’s still this thing that happens after you break up with
someone. It barely takes any time to work. All you have to do
is continue with your life, and then when you find yourself in a
room with her again it’s as if you’re a different person. Maybe
your posture is a little more confident. Maybe your laughter is
louder. You’re wearing perfume she’s never smelled before and
you have a new way of pinning back your hair. You don’t even
have to say anything because your presence alone is enough to
say Look at who I am without you.”
― Nina LaCour, Everything Leads to You

“The first time she carved something into her skin, she used the sharp tip of an X-Acto knife. She lifted up her shirt to show me after the cuts had scabbed over. She had scrawled F*** YOU on her stomach. I stood quiet for a moment, feeling the breath get knocked out of me. I should have grabbed her arm and taken her straight to the nurse's office, into that small room with two cots covered in paper sheets and the sweet, stale medicinal smell.

I should have lifted Ingrid's shirt to show the cuts. Look, I would've said to the nurse at her little desk, eyeglasses perched on her pointed nose. Help her.

Instead, I reached my hand out and traced the words. The cuts were shallow, so the scabs only stood out a little bit. They were rough and brown. I knew that a lot of girls at our school cut themselves. They wore their long sleeves pulled down past their wrists and made slits for their thumbs so that the scars on their arms wouldn't show. I wanted to ask Ingrid if it hurt to do that to herself, but I felt stupid, like I must have been missing something, so what I said was, F*** you too, b****. Ingrid giggled, and I tried to ignore the feeling that something good between us was changing.”
― Nina LaCour, Hold Still

“Maybe there is no right thing to say. Maybe the right thing is just a myth, not really out there at all.”
― Nina LaCour, Hold Still

“If only I had something to take the edge off the loneliness. If only lonely were a more accurate word. It should sound much less pretty.”
― Nina LaCour, We Are Okay

“I wish I knew why she never told me any of this. Maybe she thought I wouldn't be able to handle it, that I was too sheltered or too innocent or something. If she had told me why she cut herself all the time, or that it was the pills that made her act so spaced out, or that she was even on pills, or even saw doctors, or any of it, I would have done my best to help her. I'm not saying I'm a superhero. I'm not saying I would have just swooped down and saved her. I'm just saying the only reason everything was a waste was that she made it a waste. That whole time, back when I was just a normal kid in high school, living out my normal life, I really thought everything mattered.”
― Nina LaCour, Hold Still

“It isn't the happy ending Ingrid and I had dreamed up, but it's all a part of what I'm working through. The way life changes. The way people and things disappear. Then appear, unexpectedly, and hold you close.”
― Nina LaCour, Hold Still

“When you love someone, you are sure. You don’t need time to decide. You don’t say stop and start over and over, like you’re playing some kind of sport. You know the immensity of what you have and you protect it.”
― Nina LaCour, Everything Leads to You

“There is an indescribable feeling that comes from being desperately in love with a song.”
― Nina LaCour, Hold Still

“I learn that I am a tiny piece of a miraculous world.”
― Nina LaCour, We Are Okay

“She leans over our table and turns the sign in the window so that it says CLOSED on the outside. But on our side, perfectly positioned between Mabel’s place and mine, it says OPEN. If this were a short story, it would mean something.”
― Nina LaCour, We Are Okay

“I wish her more happiness than can fit in a person. I wish her the kind of happiness that spills over.”
― Nina LaCour, We Are Okay

“You go through life thinking there's so much you need. Your favorite jeans and sweater. The jacket with the faux-fur lining to keep you warm. Your phone and your music and your favorite books. Mascara. Irish breakfast tea and cappuccinos from Trouble Coffee. You need your yearbooks, every stiffly posed school-dance photo, the notes your friends slipped into your locker. You need the camera you got for your sixteenth birthday and the flowers you dried. You need your notebooks full of the things you learned and don't want to forget. You need your bedspread, white with black diamonds. You need your pillow - it fits the way you sleep. You need magazines promising self-improvement. You need your running shoes and your sandals and your boots. Your grade report from the semester you got straight As. Your prom dress, your shiny earrings, your pendants on delicate chains. You need your underwear, your light-colored bras and your black ones. The dream catcher hanging above your bed. The dozens and dozens of shells in glass jars... You think you need all of it. Until you leave with only your phone, your wallet, and a picture of your mother.”
― Nina LaCour, We Are Okay

“Maybe we always were the people we imagined ourselves to be.”
― Nina LaCour, The Disenchantments

“They weren't cheap and I was almost broke. It was a choice between dinner and flowers and I chose flowers because it was a dark time in my life and my room was hideous and my heart was broken and I needed something beautiful.”
― Nina LaCour, Everything Leads to You

“I used to cry over a story and then close the book, and it all would be over. Now everything resonates, sticks like a splinter, festers.”
― Nina LaCour, We Are Okay

“my life is just waiting for you to get started.”
― Nina LaCour, Hold Still