Courtney Summers Quotes

Times like these, you go so far out of your way to assure yourself you're not alone. You memorize the person you're with: the way they breathe, the way they move, the warmth of their body. All these things, you reach for every second of the day and when they're gone, you don't even have to open your eyes to know it. She's gone.

I don't have time for the 'things change speech, Parker."
"So give me the CliffNotes version.

People don't change. They just get better at hiding who they really are.

Uh, what are you doing?'
'What does it look like I'm doing?' Jake asks, settling into the seat beside me. The bus jerks forward. 'I'm sitting beside you.'
'No, you're not. Your seat is in the middle. Nice try, though.'
He has the audacity to ignore me, sets his book bag on his lap and rummages through it. After a minute, he pulls out a folded sheet of paper and hands it to me.
I unfold it. 'A love letter? How sweet.'
'No.' He turns pink. 'It's just something I found on the Internet-'
'Porn? You shouldn't have.

I'm not afraid to be alone like you are.

It's the kind of motel that makes you feel every one of your secrets. The cost of the stay is how much you're willing to live with yourself. That, and almost eighty dollars. I close the door behind me, draw the curtain, lock the door and once I do that last thing, I lean my head against it to release itself from my spent, sore muscles. I let myself get lost in my own hurt. But only for a second.

Mattie once asked me ... she'd just come home flush from a crush on Jonah Sweeten and asked me how you know when you like someone, and if I liked any boys like she did, and I didn't know what tot tell her. That I tried not to think about that kind of stuff, because it was painful, because I thought I could ever have it, but when I did end up liking someone, it always made me ache right down to my core. I realized pretty early on that the who didn't really matter so much. That anybody who listens to me, I end up loving them just a little.

It's a slow process; he always seems reluctant to let her go and I think she likes to savor that as much as possible.

Because teenage girls don't pray to God, they pray to each other. They clasp their hands over a keyboard and then they let it all out, a (stupid) girl's heart tucked into another girl's heart.

I wish his darkness lived outside of him, because you have to know it's there to see it. Like all real monsters, he hides in plain sight.

I stare at the crowbar between us. You've never truly felt the weight of something like that until you've destroyed someone with it.

How do you say that physically, you're okay, when everything is not.

There's a girl out there everyone thinks is dead and maybe she is because you know all the ways there are to kill a girl? I do.

Because I meant it. But I'm not a good person and I'll never be a good person, so who cares if I meant it, right?

Imagine 4 years.
Four years, two suicides, one death, one rape, two pregnancies (one abortion), three overdoses, countless drunken antics, pantsings, spilled food, theft, fights, broken limbs, turf wars–every day, a turf war–six months until graduation and no one gets a medal when they get out. But everything you do here counts.

High school.

This is awful. This is so hopeless. We're all lost in different ways, so how do we even help each other find our way out. We won't. We can't. We'll just stay lost forever.

When he sees me, he stops.
His eyes widen, his face pales.
And then before i can say anything, he's holding me.
And the worst part is-I want to hold him.
But I also want to slap him, hit him. Punch him. Tear out his throat.
I want him to tell me what he did to me was a mistake. Some horrible mix-up ... after I'm done holding him back.

I want to shove the question down his throat until he chokes on it.

People aren't supposed to be able to fathom eternity. It's an amount of time beyond all human comprehension. But ever since everything ended, I think I'm getting closer to understanding it. These little tastes of it in the way hell stretches around us, making pain endless and moments like this one rare and fleeting. Making moments like this one everything.

How does it feel to know that even at my worst, you're still not good enough?

Tell Liz,' I say, 'the mean girl totally got what she deserved in the end.

I want to go into the sympathy card business. . . Forget sappy messages about overcoming. I want ones that say NOW YOU'LL BE A LESSER PERSON THAN YOU WERE or WE CANNOT POSSIBLY UNDERSTAND or I CAN UNDERSTAND BECAUSE SOMEONE I KNOW DIED TOO or maybe something about how grief can make your skin feel sore and bruised and electric because that's how my skin has felt ever since, except for my hands.

I wish this was a love story. A love story about lovers whose mouths meet like two puzzle pieces fitting perfectly into place, about the electric feeling of one person's name on the other's tongue because no one has ever spoken them out loud like that before. About people who spend the night together looking at the stars until entire constellations exist within them. Everyone is perfect in that indistinct way most characters are and every perfectly constructed scene in their fictional lives is somehow more real than anything you've known or lived. Love stories, romances, leave a person secure in the knowledge they'll end Happily Ever After and who wouldn't want a story like that? I wish this was a love story because I know how it goes in one like mine, where the only moments of reprieve are the spaces between its lines.

The people feel and look the same, like they've settled here even though they know there's something more-something better-just beyond where they are.
Small-town life.

He was planning to rape me -"
"Why would he ever -"
"Because he knew he'd get away with it.

I don't know why he still cares. What a stupid thing it is, to care about a girl.

I'm going to kill a man. I'm going to steal the light from his eyes. I want to watch it go out.

I'm sorry," he tells me.
I sit down on the bed. He returns to the view of the street below. I follow his gaze and I see the infected walking slowly back and forth.
"It's okay," I say.
"Okay," he says. He nods. "Good."
He puts the gun under his chin and pulls the trigger.

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I hope I'm the ghost that belongs to her.

Montgomery is almost more than I can understand because it's so much more than it ever occurred to me to want.

I half-expect to check out, but I'm really there for it. It's not like at the dance, angry and forced. It's terrible in its gentleness and he's just wasting it on me.

It'll h-heal f-fine.'
'It'll heal ugly.'
But most things do.

Jake and Chris talk through art and discover they have so much in common it's amazing. Like, They Could Be Boyfriends If They Didn't Like Vaginas So Much Amazing.

Thank you for visiting! Come again!
Fuck this place.

I thought it could be something, I mean, eventually." Harrison finally looks at us. "My life I thought-but I mean ... it's nothing."
"Don't cry" Grace says. "You have a lot of time."
"No, I don't."
"Yeah, you do."
"No.-"
"Yeah! Yeah, you do. It's okay. Look-"
She does something that is so amazingly selfless and also gross. She tilts Harrison's face up and gives him a sweet kiss on the lips and it lasts long enough for him to taste her back, to move his mouth against hers.
Harrison stares at her dumbfounded but he's stopped crying
She is so nice.

I don't believe in forgiveness. I think if you hurt someone, it becomes part of you both. Each of you just has to live with it and the person you hurt gets to decide if they want to give you the chance to do it again. If they do and you're a good person, you won't make the same mistakes. Just whole new ones.

And it's not that she tells him it didn't happen, it's that by the time he asks, she no longer has a language of her own. But that's enough. It always is.

I close my eyes and lean my head against the seat, and the word fuck just repeats itself over and over in my head, because fuck.

We have more story than time to tell it -- but I suppose that's true for all of us.

Helen Turner hates me and the way Helen Turner hates me feels like the worst kind of betrayal. A woman who doesn't think about daughters she doesn't have.

I elbow my way through the mass of people to get to my locker because there's something immensely satisfying about the toughest part of my arm connecting with the softest part of everyone else.

I've fought off groups before and making it out in one piece was pure dumb luck. That's it. These days it feels like alive is an accidental state of being.

My hands are dying.

It's critical we examine the kind of standards we hold fictional girls to and consider how it reflects in the way we treat real girls and, most important, what kind of emotional impact that has on them. What are we saying to girls when we cannot accept difficult, hurting female characters as being worthy of love because they are difficult and hurting?

We're working with paint today and I pick the easel next to Jake's. It thrills him.
"What do you want?"
"I want to apologize if you're offended by the way I am," I tell him. "But that's the way I am with everyone. I was just trying to make you feel welcome."
"That's the crappiest apology I've ever heard."
"Well, that's because I'm not really sorry."
He rolls his eyes. "Right.

It's not about finding peace. There will never be peace.

This is what pain feels like when it's happening now and I beg my body to know this difference. It won't listen to me.

I spot a fly floating on the surface of the water, its little legs pumping madly as it fights to keep itself afloat. I know that feeling.

I want to live my life on the internet. Everything is perfect there.

Dad was thirsty, not given to great displays of affection, like his father and his father's father before him. A long line of self-indulgent men who couldn't give love but lived to take it, which isn't the same as receiving it. They were all in so much pain and that's always the perfect excuse.

How are you feeling?"
She rubs the back of her neck. "Stupid question."
"Well, ask me and I'll tell you I'm fucking great.

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The sooner you make a mistake and learn to live with it, the better. You're not responsible for everything. You can't control the way things end up.

I brush my teeth and then my hair, pulling it into a ponytail that makes the bruise on my cheek more pronounced because they'll tear me apart if they think I'm trying to hide anything.

I can't stand every boring, worthless piece of conversation I overhear because they make me wish I could be a part of them, be some nobody girl with nothing to say.

There's a miracle there, but there's something so awful about it too, bringing someone into all this now, this world where a girl can't even trust a drink that passes her lips. I can't figure out the kind of heart it takes to do something like that.

You know how you feel when you meet someone and they just give you the impression they're living on this entirely different planet from everyone else? That's sort of how I felt when I met you.

Time passes too quickly when you're getting ready to do something you don't want to do.

Everyone who knows her loves her. Except people hurt the people they love all the time.

Eddie, I think ... sometimes lies bring you to the truth ... or help you reconcile with it ...

Penny Young is the most perfect girl you know and those kinds of girls, they're put on this earth to break you. Peel back her skin and you can see her poison. Peel back mine, you can still see traces of where her poison's been.

A whole world exists outside of that hellhole.

Except forget it happened on Monday, right? And I can kiss you, but I don't know if I can hold your hand. And I can kiss you, but I can't ask you questions. Forget it, Parker. If you're too afraid to start anything, just forget it.

Now is not about gathering courage, it's about staying one step ahead of my fear.

Cardboard cutouts of cheerleaders operated by arthritic monkeys would move more fluidly.

I want to feel this. I need it to hurt for me to feel it, I think.

Death has been here and where death has been no light shall ever be .

Jäger' he says and I know I'll never be able to drink Jäger again. It will remind me of this moment, of her, of joking on my own grief in front of a boy whose name I knew before he knew mine.

Waiting around to be saved is like waiting to die and I have done more of both than anyone else in the room.

I'm dying. I am dying. I have finally achieved what I set out to do. My heart is splitting open and I breathe in but no air gets into my lungs.

It's just this emptiness between us, the stupid idea I could kiss it away,

Norton says he's going to tell on me for being late. Henley and Grey will get the notice and I'll have to discuss it on Friday. Why were you late, Parker? What do you think that would accomplish, Parker? And then the tough question. What destructive behaviors were you engaging in for the five minutes you weren't in class, Parker?

It hits me: that's going to die with me, that story. My story. My family, everyone in the school, their stories too–I'm the last person who could tell them and if I die, they're gone.

No one's got any anywhere they need to be but they all want to be somewhere else, so they're not happy. If my dad taught me anything, it's that you can't make people like that happy. You just have to survive them as best you can.

Look, Sloane, I get it. I do. It's like being ... it's like standing between glass, the grief. And behind you is everything like it was and ahead of you is–"
"Nothing." she finishes. "There's nothing left."
"We're left," I say. "That's something, And you must believe it because every time you've had a choice, you kept going." I stare at the man, wishing I could close his wrists, stitch them shut. "But maybe you don't realize you're doing it because you've spent so long telling yourself you can't."
I rub my face, missing the bed. After a while she speaks.
"What can you possibly want from this?" she asks.
"Everything we lost.

No, you're a work of art.

Turning myself into the idea of a girl. Or, an idea of an idea. A manic pixie dream, I guess. The kind everyone says they're tired of, but I don't know that they really mean it. The girl nobody ends up loving long or loving well, but nobody wants to give up, either.

it's blindingly awful and awfully satisfying all at the same time.

The thing no one tells you about surviving, about the mere act of holding out, is how many hours are nothing because nothing happens. They also don't tell you about how you can share your deepest secrets with someone, kiss them, and the next hour it's like there's nothing between you because not everything can mean something all the time or you'd be crushed under the weight of it.

If anyone else said that to me, I think I'd roll my eyes, but Culler saying it to me means me committing it to memory and locking it inside so I'll always have it.

I take a swig from Milo's flask and hand it back to him. He screws the top back on. He inherited the flash from his grandfather and stole the liquor from his mother. The circle of life.

Cell phones don't run as fast as the mouths in this town.

My eyes burn, and tears slip down my cheeks and I can't even imagine how pathetic I look. Girl with a busted face, torn-up arms, begging for the opportunity to save other girls. Why do I have to beg for that?

...she doesn't even blink and it makes me grateful but I fucking hate that too, because the kind of decency everybody ought to live by isn't something that deserves my gratitude.

People have to live with things they don't want to live with all the time, but - how?

I bring my hand to his face. I run my fingers lightly across his skin. My index finger traces his lips.
I just want to feel that he's here.
I lay down next to him and rest my head on his chest. He tenses just for a second, surprised, and then he relaxes and puts his arm around me. I don't want to talk. I just want to be quiet with him. Listen to his heart - that constant.

The silence stretches between us. Words aren't so easy to come by, after his admission. It takes him a while to dig some up.

I remember how covered in blood Rhys was. All over his shirt, his jeans, caked on his neck, his hands. I didn't even think about it then, but it must have belonged to his mother, father. For seven days, he wore their deaths and he never said a word to any of us about it. I feel so bad for him and I don't know how to tell him, so I reach for his hand and hold it as hard as I can, crushing his fingers in mine. It's a futile attempt to redirect his pain. He lets me hurt him for a few minutes before gently pulling away.

I've been variations of hurt my whole life.

They listened to the soundtrack of their impending doom.

I get caught up in outcomes. I convince myself they're truths. No one will notice how wrong you are if everything you do ends up right. The rest becomes incidental. So incidental that, after a while, you forget. Maybe you are perfect. Good. It must be true. Who can argue with results? You're not so wrong after all. So you buy into it and you go crazy maintaining it. Except it creeps up on you sometimes, that you're not right. Imperfect. Bad. So you snap your fingers and it goes away.
Until something you can't ignore happens and you see it all over yourself.
And there's only one thing left to do.

I didn't want to be popular because it was easier; I wanted to be popular because in high school that's the best thing you can be: perfect. Everything else is shit.

Places like that, places that look so nice they don't seem real? The worst shit you can imagine happens in them. And I'm not wrong.

My eyes are wide and wild and I can't see beyond them. I can only see what they've seen.

My dad used to say makeup was a shallow girl's sport, but it's not. It's armor.

In the girls' bathroom, I run the water hot and hold my hands under it until I feel

We eat breakfast, lunch, and dinner to the soundtrack of our own impending death.

I don't know why this has to be so hard, why I haven't been through enough. It should be easy. It should have always been easy.

It's your last year, Grey," she says. "Make a difference for your school." I'd burn this place to the ground before I ever willingly make a difference for it, but I'm smarter than saying that out loud and she should be smarter than tempting me.

Hey, let's give her some space. Get back to the game, guys," Chris says. Thank God for him, just this once. "And cheerleading. Get back to that, too." No one moves. "Okay, fuck off, basically, is what I'm saying. Fuck off!

Eddie, It's like you died that night, he whispers.
So that's it. I died.
I've been dead.
I blink back the tears and pick at the mattress, but I don't say anything. I don't know what I could say to him. I don't know how to convince him I'm still here when I'm not sure of it myself anymore.