Amy Engel Quotes

The real danger has always lived in my granddad's kind voice, his soft caresses. All of it masquerading as innocent, but really just a gateway drug for girls starved for affection, desperate for someone to love them. He doesn't force us with a heavy hand. He manipulates with a gentle touch, guides us exactly where he wants us to go. So in the end, we blame only ourselves.

I'm glad she's not faking affection. It's more honest than what her husband is doing, at least. Dislike is an emotion I can respect.

No one controls who we turn into but us.

I don't understand how the pain of losing him can be a pale shadow in comparison to the pain of finding him again.

always believed in who I am even during the times I struggled to believe myself.

That's what love is, though, isn't it? You don't stop loving someone just because they disappoint you.

My mission is not to make him happy and bear his children and be his wife. My mission is to kill him.

Because that's the one thing women are never, ever allowed to be. We can be sad, distraught, confused, pleading, forgiving. But not furious. Fury is reserved for other people. The worst thing you can be is an angry woman, an angry mother

How do you measure the life of one person against the greater good? Can it ever be the right thing to sacrifice an innocent person? And how do you know what the greater good really is?

He's an eighteen-year-old boy and this is his wedding night. I don't think he's taking me home to play checkers.

I know the days can get long if you don't have a purpose.

Are you happy, Ivy?' he asks, surprising me.
In my whole life, I don't think anyone ever asked me that question.

...sometimes you have to hurt people just to prove you're alive.

He knows me better than anyone ever has. Than anyone ever will again. I would have stopped it if I could have. But I've learned the hard way, we can't choose who we love. Love chooses us. Love doesn't care about what's convenient or easy or planned. Love has its own agenda and all we can do is get out of its way.

I'm not sure how we got to this place, where a girl's only value is in what kind of marriage she has, how capable she is of keeping a man happy.

We're all fucked up, Lane, one way or another. It's only a matter of degree.

I want to see you naked. I want to touch you. I want you to touch me. I just...want.

It would leave a little rotten spot, right here." I push my fist into the soft space beneath my rib cage. "Something that would only get bigger and darker with time.

I remind myself of what [Bishop's] father's done. What he is still doing. But Bishop's touch is gentle, his intentions good. No matter how hard I look, I cannot find the blood on his hands.

He blows out a breath, takes a step toward me. The hallway is so narrow that I'm pinned between the wall and his body, heat rolling off him in waves. "Yeah," he says, voice low. "I feel things." His green eyes burn. It's the most emotion I've seen from him so far, and I have trouble taking a full breath, my lungs compressed with tension. "That's the whole point, Ivy. I want you to feel them, too.

You're easy to read, Ivy, but the whole book of you is complicated.

Who do you want to turn into?" I mean the question to be mocking, but that's not how it comes out. I sound interested. I reach down and scratch my leg, trying to hid my embarrassment.
Bishop looks at me. "Someone honest. Someone who tries to do the right thing. Someone who follows his own heart, even if it disappoints people." He pauses. "Someone brave enough to be all those things."
A boy who doesn't want to lie, married to a girl who can't tell the truth. If there is a God, he has a sick sense of humor.

Often, when I am able to check out a book, I read it a dozen times before returning it, desperate to remain lost in the magic of someone else's story.

I don't trust most people. Except for you."
"Why me?"
"Because everyone needs someone to put their faith in.

Maybe I'll be okay. Maybe I'll make it to the ocean.

You can't outrun what's inside of you. You can only acknowledge it, work around it, try and turn it into something better. I may not know exactly where I'm headed, but this time I'm choosing my own destiny.

You think I had a choice?" Bishop demands. "What choice? I'm not like your father or Callie, Ivy. I was never going to just let you go. I love you. There was never any choice.

Sometimes it's a revelation, even to me, how much more comfortable I am with cruelty than with kindness.

I love you," he says quietly. I want to take his words, the truth of them I can see on his face, and cup them in my hands like a glowing coal from the fire. Keep them with me warm and bright, a talisman.

I just want to be with you. Walk next to you, Ivy, wherever you're headed. That's all.

How did you even know where to look?" "I'm the president's son, remember? I'd heard rumors about a group near the river, southeast of Westfall. I figured it was as good a place to start as any." "Why?" I draw back. "Why would you do that?" "Remember what I told you once?" He pauses. His fingers graze the sensitive skin of my waist underneath my shirt. "About not giving up on you?

I've grown accustomed to the stars above my head as I sleep, the ache in my muscles as we walk the land. The freedom that comes with defining your world instead of letting it define you.

Life is one sick joke after another, I'm discovering. Because it hardly seems fair that it should hurt so much to finally get exactly what I've been wishing for.

Your eyes are still sad," she tells me. "But your whole face lights up when you look at him.

People. And the brutal things we do to one another.
The fence shakes against my cheek and I turn, careful to keep my gaze lifted. I don't have it in me to look at her again. Bishop is grasping the chain-link with both hands, knuckles white, his eyes closed. His whole body is wound tight as a spring, like if I reached for him he would simply break apart at the joints, splinter into a hundred pi8eces. I don't try to touch him.
He lets out a yell and then another and another, loud and wild and out of control. He shakes the fence hard with both hands. His anger and frustration are more potent somehow because they are unexpected. When his scream fades into silence, he rests his forehead against the metal. "Sometimes," he says, voice raw, "I hate this place." He twists his neck and looks at me, hands still hooked in the fence above his head.
"I know," I say, barely a whisper. "Me, too.

He didn't save me, though. He allowed me the freedom to save myself, which is the very best type of rescue.

I want to be someone strong and brave enough to make hard choices. But I want to be fair and loving enough to make the right ones.

My father might not have held my hand or expressed his love openly, but he taught Callie and me that we had inherent values, that we were fully formed human beings without a boy by our side.

The scars are just something that happened to me. They aren't me. Not anymore.

There are only two choices. Stay here and die. Or get up and see what happens next.

And maybe that's love, too - feeling the other person's hurts like your own.