Alyssa > Alyssa's Quotes

“Just because you're good at something doesn't mean you have to do it.”
― Matthew Quick, Every Exquisite Thing

“People enter our lives for a season, a reason, or a lifetime.”
― Matthew Quick, Every Exquisite Thing

“And then one day you will look for you in the mirror and you’ll no longer be able to identify yourself—you’ll only see everyone else. You’ll know that you did what they wanted you to do. You will have assimilated. And you will hate yourself for it, because it will be too late.”
― Matthew Quick, Every Exquisite Thing

“I knew that I had reached the end of childhood once I realized that adults in my life didn't know anymore than I did.”
― Matthew Quick, Every Exquisite Thing

“Behind every exquisite thing that existed, there was something tragic.”
― Matthew Quick, Every Exquisite Thing

“And so maybe it isn't the motivating factors that matter so much as simply participating - thrusting your best true, authentic self into the universe with wild abandon. Maybe yielding to our true nature propels us forward into the great unknown, toward targets that we haven't even dreamed up yet but exist nonetheless.”
― Matthew Quick, Every Exquisite Thing

“Far too often, people are woefully predictable. And I know many things. It's a curse. Here's something else I know: You are not doomed to be your parents. You can break the cycle. You can be whoever you want to be. But you will pay a price. You parents and everyone else will punish you if you choose to be you and not them. That's the price of your freedom. The cage is unlocked, but everyone is too scared to walk out because they whack you when you try, and they whack you hard. They want you to be scared, too. They want you to stay in the cage. But once you are a few steps beyond the trapdoor, they can't reach you anymore, so the whacking stops. That's another secret: They're too afraid to follow. They adore their own cages.”
― Matthew Quick, Every Exquisite Thing

“Sometimes you just have to pick a direction and make mistakes. Then you use what you learn from your failure to pick new, better directions so you can make more mistakes and keep learning.”
― Matthew Quick, Every Exquisite Thing

“Stop saying no offense,” I said, “when you say offensive things. It’s not a free pass.”
― Daniel Handler, Why We Broke Up

“I was stupid, the official descriptive phrase for happy.”
― Daniel Handler, Why We Broke Up

“The thing with your heart's desire is that your heart doesn't even know what it desires until it turns up.”
― Daniel Handler, Why We Broke Up

“I started making plans, thinking we would get that far.”
― Daniel Handler, Why We Broke Up

“I’d ruin any day, all my days, for those long nights with you, and I did.”
― Daniel Handler, Why We Broke Up

“...the moron who thought love was forever.”
― Daniel Handler, Why We Broke Up

“You either have the feeling or you don’t.”
― Daniel Handler, Why We Broke Up

“The thing with your heart's desire is that your heart doesn't even know what it desires until it turns up. Like a tie at a tag sale, some perfect thing in a crate of nothing, you were just there, uninvited, and now suddenly the party was over and you were all I wanted. I hadn't even been looking, not for you, and now you were my heart's desire.”
― Daniel Handler, Why We Broke Up

“It was a mistake," you said. But the cruel thing was, it felt like the mistake was mine, for trusting you.”
― David Levithan, The Lover's Dictionary

“Trying to write about love is ultimately like trying to have a dictionary represent life. No matter how many words there are, there will never be enough.”
― David Levithan, The Lover's Dictionary

“It scares me how hard it is to remember life before you. I can't even make the comparisons anymore, because my memories of that time have all the depth of a photograph. It seems foolish to play games of better and worse. It's simply a matter of is and is no longer.”
― David Levithan, The Lover's Dictionary

“abyss, n.

There are times when I doubt everything. When I regret everything you've taken from me, everything I've given you, and the waste of all the time I've spent on us.”
― David Levithan, The Lover's Dictionary

“abstraction, n.

Love is one kind of abstraction. And then there are those nights when I sleep alone, when I curl into a pillow that isn't you, when I hear the tiptoe sounds that aren't yours. It's not as if I can conjure you up completely. I must embrace the idea of you instead.”
― David Levithan, The Lover's Dictionary

“I want my own books to have their own shelves," you said, and that's how I knew it would be okay to live together.”
― David Levithan, The Lover's Dictionary

“If Mom died, the sun would go out. Period.”
― Jandy Nelson, I'll Give You the Sun