Amy Reed Quotes

I don't know if anyone can ever really explain why they believe in someone. But I do. I believe in you. I hope that's worth something.

Is this what nice is? Letting people think things that aren't true just to avoid hurting their feelings? Being nice is dishonest.

I wonder if anybody else feels this way, if anyone in here is as scared as I am. Are they as sad and angry and confused and ashamed? Is that even possible? Is it even possible for one building to hold all that pain?

That's what dreams are really like, you know? They're not full of melting clocks or floating roses or people made out of rocks. Most of the time, dreams look just like the normal world. It's your feelings that tell you something's off. Not your mind, not your intellect, not something as obvious as that. The only part of you that really knows what's going on is the part of you that's most a mystery. If that's not Surrealism, I don't know what is.

Your memories of me are part trees and part ocean and part magic, and I don't know if I will ever be that girl again. She was the best version of me.

I'm empty and lonely and lost and I'm starving, and there isn't enough in the whole wide world that could make me feel whole.

Everyone at school has their little group. Even the people nobody likes seem to tolerate each other enough to sit together at lunch. But I just sort of wander around by myself most of the time. It's almost be better if I thought no one liked me, if I had some weird tick or social inadequacy that cold easily explain my alienation but it's not that easy. People talk to me at school and invite me to parties, but something's missing on the smaller scale. I don't belong to anybody. I don't have anyone who is mine.

I said just let me try one more time and she said, "THAT'S ENOUGH, ISABEL," again, and she could just say it over and over and it would never get through my thick skull because I'm always wanting and wanting because nothing is ever enough you are never enough I am never enough I am never enough I AM NEVER ENOUGH.

People don't just let you change identities, not unless there's something in it for them.

Everyone gets the message when they're a kid that girls like pink and boys like blue, but she's taken it to a whole new level, like being a girl is her religion and wearing pink is some kind of commandment.

Before there was Cocaine or vodka or sex or any of that, there was fantasy. There was escape. That was my first addiction. I remember being a little kid and imagining everything different, myself different. How did I get the idea in my head at age eight that everything was better somewhere else? Why would a child have a hole inside that can't get full no matter what she does? The real world could never make me happy, so I retreated to the world inside my head. And as I grew, as the real world proved itself more and more painful, the fantasy world expanded.

Everybody has fucked-up families, even normal kids, even the ones who aren't in here. There's no magic math equation that makes us addicts, nothing that separates us from everyone else.

This is the first time in I don't know how long that I've come even close to caring what happens next. I guess you could call that hope.

Silence does not mean yes. No can be thought and felt but never said. It can be screamed silently on the inside. It can be in the wordless stone of a clenched fist, fingernails digging into palm. Her lips sealed. Her eyes closed. His body just taking, never asking, never taught to question silence

I feel like I'm a snow globe and someone shook me up and now every little piece of me is falling back randomly and nothing is ending up where it used to be.

Fucked-up, Insecure, Neurotic, and Emotional. (FINE)

You can always cram the wrong piece into the puzzle hole if you push hard enough and limit your definition of 'fitting.

Every since I got sick, all I've done is think about how everyone else is feeling.

Phones are only good for ordering pizza and telling someone you're running late

Even though I'm sleeping again, everything still feels a little rickety, like I'm here but not quite here, like I'm just a stand-in for my real self, like someone could just reach over and pinch me and I'd deflate. I thought I was feeling better, but I don't know anymore.

Maybe this is all love is and all it will ever be
boys fucking girls and pretending it's love, girls getting fucked and pretending they like it, saying "I love you, too," and wanting to throw up.

There are voices you can silence.

This thing that's always been inside and hidden deep is getting bigger and stronger and threatening to show itself, and I want to stop it but I also don't, and I don't know if I'm ready, but I think maybe I want what's inside turned outside, maybe I want everything out in the open, all my secrets laid out for everyone to see. I wonder what that would look like. I wonder what kind of mess it would make. I wonder if you can ever really be ready for the part of you that you've been hiding your whole life to finally come out.

Maybe sometimes you have to leave before you're ready to let go; sometimes you have to leave before someone is ready to let go of you. That's the rub of it-if you wait until you're ready to do everything, you'll never get anything done.

What Erin wants to do with pain is fix it, make it go away, and sometimes that's not what other people want.

I'm feeling really hopeful about it, like maybe I actually have a chance to get better. To be happy. It's funny, I just realized that my whole life, the whole time I've been trying to be perfect, I never once considered happiness as part of the equation. I guess it seemed so impossible I couldn't even let myself fantasize about it. But now, I don't know, things feel different somehow. Like impossible things might not be so impossible.

Margot smiles. "Your comments are always thoughtful and smart. You seem really steady and calm, and not swayed by people's disagreements and emotions and everything."
"But I'm too quiet," Grace says.
"You don't have to be loud to be a leader," Margot says. "People respect you. That's what's important.

Teen angst is so boring, isn't it? I try so hard not to be a cliche, but it's like written in my DNA to hate my parents and be totally unsatisfied with everything. I wonder if there's anyone our age who actually likes their life.

And I know -I just know- you can remind me what it feels like to have someone look at me and love me with wanting me to be something else.

This is the downside of being complete. Others want what you have. They covet your doneness.

But Erin has empathy, lots of it, so much it hurts sometimes, so much that other people's pain turns into her own pain and makes her completely incapable of doing anything useful for anyone. That's why it's easier to avoid it than to engage. It's easier to try to ignore it than try to comfort whoever's hurting, because usually that backfires and makes things worse.

Do you remember? Do you remember the world before the poison?

And what they're doing could be called kissing but it's more like sword fighting with tongues.

What are you supposed to do when you forget what normal feels like?

There is nothing lonelier than fear.

The thing is, you don't get many choices when you're stuck in a secret. The world gets so small, you learn to be grateful for whatever you can get.

How can she stand up there so tall as she's telling us how her mother beat her and her father molested her when she was a little girl? How is it possible for her to look so proud? How is she not being consumed by shame? She should be disintegrating before our eyes. She should be struck by lightning, and God's big, angry, booming voice should be shaking the room with "How dare you? I told you never to tell." But that's not her God, she says. Her God is loving and kind and wants what's best for her. Her God loves peace and serenity and forgiveness. Her God doesn't make her keep secrets. I thought I knew God all my life, but maybe it was some other guy the whole time. I want this God. I want Val's God. I want a God who doesn't make me jump through hoops and hate myself to earn his love.

Maybe that's all love is-one person saying it because they think they're supposed to and the other person feeling to guilty to say anything else

The first week is the hardest. Then little by little the world opens up, and you realize there are all these people around you with their own needs that have nothing to do with you. Then you forget, and everything's about you again. And maybe that cycle continues for the rest of your life. Maybe the world keeps expanding and contracting. Maybe you know you're well when it finally stays the same size.

Smoke is not chasing me and making my eyes sweat. My eyes are not burning. I am not crying. I am not standing behind my mother and she is not facing the wall and she is not saying, 'Smoke follows beauty.' Smoke follows beauty. Smoke follows beauty. Smoke follows beauty.

I feel the ghost of his fingers inside me.

Me, I'm my own brand of perfect, I guess. The kind that has to work a little harder than everyone else.

What if talking about your feelings doesn't fix anything? What if what you really need is to make the feelings go away?

I don't know what any of this means. All I know is I feel crazy, like I want to cry and laugh and scream at the same time.

I figure it's better to make a decision and do something rather than just sitting around thinking about it forever. Then at least I'll be moving.

And that's when it hits me, the punch in the stomach, the carving out of my insides. That's when I realize that none of this is a movie. I will not go out with a bang. There is no ending. There are no credits. I will wake up and I will keep waking up and this will always be waiting for me.

But I am doing that thing I always do-the obsessing about what I don't have, the ignoring where I am now.

It feels like the ground is breathing and the air has hands, like everything is moving except me, like I am the only thing solid, like it is the rest of the world that is dizzy.

People grow up listening to all kinds of stories, but that doesn't mean they all want to spend their whole lives studying them.

Sometimes I think you don't really believe the things you say; you just like the sound of yourself having opinions.

I was trying to be brave. I was trying to let people in. I was trying. I am who I am today because of my messes. Because I've survived them. Because I've written about them. Because I've learned from them, because I keep searching for new tools to clean them up, because I keep trying to heal.

I'm not the girl they remember. I'm not anyone they know.

I feel myself floating without the weight of him on my body.

She hates the feeling of the world crushing her. She hates metaphors being the only way to describe it.

I want to crush my cigarette on his eyelid. I would rather he keep fucking me for the rest of the night than lie here staring at me tracing my ribs with his fingertips, acting like what happened meant something.

I'd love to wrap myself inside your sadness and pretend it is mine

Humans are capable of a lot more than they know.

He backs out the door batting those eyelashes I thought were so sexy when I first met him. Now I want to pluck them out one by one.

They are ghosts of people I never knew, which the rain will wash away.

But just because she's not helpless doesn't mean she doesn't need help.

And my name sounds like flowers in his mouth.

You act like you're invincible, but I know deep down you want someone to hold your hand and buy you flowers and look you in the eye and tell you you're his soul mate. You want someone who will love every piece of you, even the pieces you can't love yourself.

I don't feel great, but I also don't feel terrible, either, and I guess that's how normal people feel most of the time. They live in the space between black and white, and their ups and downs are various shades of gray, not the extreme highs and lows I've always thought of as normal. I think that's one of the major differences between us and them, between addicts and Normies. Somewhere along the line we got stuck on this roller coaster that only knows how to go to the highest up and the lowest low. We get high so we can feel invincible and perfect, but the feeling never lasts. Gravity always wins, and we fall fast, to a place lower and darker than many people will probably ever know. And the crazy thing is that this is just normal for us. We cycle through these extremes all the time, and it's become as natural as breathing. Exhausting, but natural.

How is feeling like a failure supposed to help me? The way I see it, they should invent some pill that just makes you forget whatever you want, some pill that makes you numb and functional.

You never heard me tell you that I want everything, not just the perfect pieces, not just the sparkling, charming snapshots of you. You never let me tell you that I want every piece of you, even the broken ones, even the dark places where scary things hide.

No one knows what to do with me now that I'm alive. There's no protocol for how to treat someone who comes back from the dead. There are so many books about grief and loss, about saying good-bye to the people you love. But there is no book about taking back that good-bye.

This is the kind of thing that makes sense to them; this is a language they know. They know what to do with`disease'. They know how to attach a doctor's medical descriptions to hope.

The things is," Rosina says, "people don't want to hear something that'll make their lives more difficult, even if it's the truth. People hate having to change the way they see things. So instead of admitting the world is ugly, they shit on the messenger for telling them about it.

Getting rid of the drugs doesn't get rid of all the other ways you learned to deal with the world. It's not that easy.

What if I can't ever be who you want me to be? What if I keep letting you down?

Smoke follows beauty.

And now they're telling me I have to get rid of the only thing that loosens its grip. That's the irony, isn't it? [...] The thing that helped has become the thing that imprisons us. We keep feeding it and it keeps wanting more. This is a disease that tries to convince you that you don't have it. This is a disease where the medicine that gives relief is the same thing that kills you.

Maybe there's a galaxy with a planet that's just a little more tilted, with a sun that shines just a little bit darker, and that's where I'm supposed to be, where it somehow makes sense to feel this broken.

She says nothing to Pastor Skinner about how Jesus fought for what he believed in, how he stood up against corrupt people in power, how he showed women kindness and respect at a time in history when they received little of either. But that is not the Jesus who Pastor Skinner is talking about. In fact, the pastor isn't talking much about Jesus at all.

Your boyfriend smells bad, says Sarah as she sniffs the armpit of the giant sweatshirt.
All boys smell bad I say and she nods her head like we have just figured out something very important.