Leah Raeder Quotes

You should love something while you have it, love it fully and without reservation, even if you know you'll lose it someday. We lose everything. If you're trying to avoid loss, there's no point in taking another breath, or letting your heart beat one more time. It all ends." His fingers curl around mine. "That's all life is. Breathing in, breathing out. The space between two breaths.

We don't always get closure. Sometimes we have to make our own.

Don't come here to fuck with my head and play games. You don't test someone's love by leaving them.

I don't categorize people by who I'm allowed to like and who I'm allowed to love.

Are you scared?" he said into my hair.
"Yeah."
"What scares you?"
I kept my eyes on the ceiling.
"That this is too good. That it won't last. That you'll leave.

This is what happens when you lie. Lies grow thin and steely and hard and become bars. Bars become a cage.

The removal of all boundaries, all distractions, leaving us with nothing but each other - scary. What kind of people would we be without secrecy and desperation?

Things I didn't expect to do my senior year:
Become a drug dealer.
Become my mother.
Find and lose the love of my life.

This is what helps me sleep at night. Knowing that one of us stood up and refused to take it. One of us said, Fuck you, and struck back.
One of us became the wolf and bloodied her jaws so that others can live without fear.

When he drove away I took a picture of the receding tail lights, and after his car was gone I stood there holding the photo up to the street, pretending. What is this feeling? I wondered. What is this hunger that grows worse the more I feed it?
They'd come up with a name for it a long time ago. But you already know what it's called, don't you?

And always, in my pocket, in my skin, in the back of my mind, the hollowness where he used to be. The empty circle where my finger used to fit into the ring. The crimson flakes and ruby dust strewn across the ledges of my ribs.

The whole summer was inside of us.

I want all of you," I said. "Every part."
He whispered back, "It's yours.

A bitch is a woman who gets what she wants.

It could have been anyone," I said.
"All the women who look at you when we go out.
Ms. Bisette at school. God, even Hiyam. Why me?"
He stared at the coffee table,
the reflection of snow like confectioner's sugar sifting down.
"It couldn't have been anyone," he said softly.
"For a long time before I met you, I felt my life was this kind of test.
I was in deep, cold water, swimming for shore,
and my arms were getting tired,my skin numb.
On the shore was everything I thought I wanted: a better job, a house, a family."
He swallowed, his throat cording with tension.
"But I could barely keep my head above water.
Eventually I stopped seeing the shore. Only cold dark blue, in all directions.
I know it's cliché, but when I met you, my eyes opened.
I looked around, and realized I could stand up whenever I wanted.
There was firm ground under my feet.
That shore in the distance was an illusion.
I was already somewhere beautiful.

Nobody knows how to be a grown-up. We're all just pretending for each other.

Was that what I'd have to do? Pry my ribs open and see whose hands fit, whose fingers were stained with the same red inside me?

His lips were soft and tinged with bitter earthy beer, and he kissed me gently,

Girls get under each other's skin. We get too close, too attached, too crazy, and then we can't let go. Our claws sink too deep. When we separate, we tear each other apart.

Angels trying to scar themselves, bored of perfection.

Wesley had called it self-destructive. Evan understood. It wasn't about flirting with death, like Mom. It was about wanting to live all the way to the seams of life.

This world is so thick with ghosts it's a wonder anyone can breathe.

The first thing he taught me was how to make love.
Before you laugh, know that I'd always hated that phrase. It sounded so corny, so old. Hippies made love. People my mom's age, though I preferred to believe I was an immaculate conception.
People my age hooked up, fucked, had sex. We didn't attach frilly ideas of oneness and eternity to a basic biological act. Most of us were from single-parent homes. Those who weren't wished they were when their parents screamed and beat the shit out of each other. We grew up sexualized, from toddler beauty pageants to the constant reminder that adults were waiting to lure us into vans with candy. The invention of MMS gave us a platform for the distribution of amateur porn.
That's a lot of conditioning to break through.

I told you what I was when we began. I'm the black iris watered by poison. The wolf that raised its head among sheep and devoured its way, ruthless and bloody, to freedom. I never forgave, never forgot.
I didn't feel sorry. I felt bad. As in bad girl, not guilty. And feeling bad made me feel so fucking good.

In a typical college romance novel, he'd be a gorgeous but troubled sex god who'd cure all my deep-seated psych issues with a good hard fuck. I'd smell his misogyny and abusive tendencies from miles off but my brain would turn to hormone soup because abs. That's the formula. Broken girl + bad boy = sexual healing. All you need to fix that tragic past is a six-pack. More problems? Add abs.
It's Magic Dick Lit.

Most of us can't even fix ourselves.

Don't lead people on. It's cruel.

I wouldn't have to explain that I fall in love with minds, not genders or body parts.

You know, rust is just oxidation. The same chemical process as fire. Oxygen interacts with steel, electrons drift from one element to the other. So really, rust is a slow fire. Isn't that weird? Water causes something to burn.

His hand circled the back of my neck. "I need you tonight."
Has there ever been a more effective line in the history of pickup lines than "I need you?

What happened felt more like chemistry than a kiss. Pure liquid heat on my lips, dissolving into me, trailing a hot line down my chest and pooling in my stomach. My heels rose off the floor. All of me rose, unanchored, held down only by his weight pressing me to the chilly slab of the door. We kissed as we could not have done until now - like lovers.

For a long time before I met you, I felt my life was this kind of test. I was in deep, cold water, swimming for shore, and my arms were getting tired,my skin numb. On the shore was everything I thought I wanted: a better job, a house, a family."

He swallowed, his throat cording with tension. "But I could barely keep my head above water. Eventually I stopped seeing the shore. Only cold dark blue, in all directions. I know it's cliché, but when I met you, my eyes opened. I looked around, and realized I could stand up whenever I wanted. There was firm ground under my feet.

He can talk about the future all he wants, but it's not going to wait for him to start.

You can fall in love again with someone you're already in love with. It's like waking from a dream within a dream and finding another layer, the colors more vivid, the light more lucid, the fantasy more real. Being in love is an endless loop of waking to reverie.

Point is, nobody knows what to do with this life. And the second you think you do, your life will flip upside down.

Will Siobhan go out with me tonight?' And the professor said, very derisively, 'No.' So the boy, thinking himself clever, asked me where I'd like to have dinner, and I said I'd tell him later."
Her teeth flashed as she spoke.
"After class, I asked the professor why he'd answered 'no' with such certainty. Do you know what he said?"
"What?"
"He said, 'Because you're having dinner with me.' And that was the night I started dating Professor Brown.

I know what you were searching for. The same thing I want.

To live without pain.

But the only way to live without pain is to live without feeling. Or to not live.

I caught all these little moments while I was pretending to live them. I did live them, but I'm not sure where I was when they happened, if I was the lens watching or the skin being touched. That's the whole point. We don't know anymore.

So if we're both so happy, why are we sad?

Hate is when you love someone but wish you didn't.

The thought of how much happiness lay scattered across the universe, unrealized, in fragments, waiting for the right twist of fate to bring it together.

The storm front had finally broken, tatters of cloud pulling apart like cotton candy and sprinkling the sky with the bright sugar grains of stars.

Who fixes broken people? Is it only other broken people, ones who've already been ruined? And do we need to be fixed? It was the messiness and hurt in our pasts that drove us, and that same hurt connected us at a subdermal level, the kind of scars written so deeply in your cells that you can't even see them anymore, only recognize them in someone else.

Yeah, I hook up with older guys. And then I leave them, before they can leave me.

Listening to her banter with Armin was like standing between two ballet dancers in a gunfight. They circled each other elegantly, feinting, pirouetting, setting up the fatal shot, and Blythe was usually the one to fire it point-blank to Armin's chest. He accepted his wounds with a gentleman's grace, and the dance resumed.

Are you in love with him?"
I rolled my head on the plank to look at Wesley.
"I don't think I know what being in love is yet. But this is different than anything I've ever felt."
"What's it feel like?"
"Remember when you thought I was jumping off to kill myself?"
He winced.
"It's like that," I said.
"But no one catches you. You're just hanging over infinity.

Sometimes all you know about where you're going is that it's away from where you are.

Let the sheep bleat. Their own noises soothe them.

I looked at her, then back at him. "If you really loved me, you'd do it."
Jealousy is the rust that eats away at morality's hard steel. It's cancerous, and once it starts it spreads, and spreads. At first it lets small concessions through. He watched me drink, do drugs. He looked the other way when we stole things. He was in love. He never realized all these lapses were weakening him, that a moment would come when I'd push harder than before and the entire structure would crumble into red powder.
Armin gave me the gun. Took the bat. Closed his eyes and inhaled. Opened them and swung and exhaled.
He'd gone for the head.

This is ridiculous," I said, trying to laugh it off. "I never cry at movies."
"Because you've never been in love," he said.

This world is run by people who know somebody.

I'm not over you. I dream about you every night. I watch that fucking video over and over just to hear your voice. Does that make you happy? Is that proof I cared?

His eyes moved over me, but hovered mostly on my face. That was almost worse. Who am I without this? I thought. Without the seduction I wear like armor, without my bravado and cocksure confidence? Am I really just a little girl under it all?

I am not the heroine of this story.
And I'm not trying to be cute. It's the truth. I'm diagnosed borderline and seriously fucked-up. I hold grudges. I bottle my hate until it ferments into poison, and then I get high off the fumes. I'm completely dysfunctional and that's the way I like it, so don't expect a character arc where I finally find Redemption, Growth, and Change, or learn How to Forgive Myself and Others.

Ellis and I had debated: Should we show the bad as well, or only the good? I said only the good. Why should Skylar's suffering linger on? Why not let her rest, celebrate her life? But Ellis said showing the suffering was important because somewhere in that crowd tonight, someone else suffered, too. Someone would see those photos of her pain and feel a resonance. The point of art, of any communion between human beings, wasn't to make people feel good - it was to make them feel less alone.

I dream of you in colors that don't exist.

The only way to cure an obsession is to become obsessed with something else.

It's always goodbye with the mouth and until we meet again with the heart.

Falling for someone is like pulling a loose thread. It happens stitch by stitch. You feel whole most of the time even while the seams pop, the knots loosen, everything that holds you together coming undone. It feels incredible, this opening of yourself to the world. Not like the unraveling it is. Only afterward do you glance down at the tangle of string around your feet that used to be a person who was whole and self-contained and realize that love is not a thing that we create. It's an undoing.

Maybe all you need to pull you back form the ledge is to know someone would miss you if you fell.

Why did everything beautiful come from pain?

But this is who you are. You're a liar, and a thief, and a junkie. I don't hate you, Mom. I'm disappointed in you.

But he just stared at my eyes, as if searching for a stray eyelash. A free wish.

Grow up. This is real. The world is ugly and nasty and fucked up, and so are we.

She was an uptight elitist bitch who considered fast food unworthy of being fed to dogs, but when she did something she did it wholeheartedly, with perverse gusto, as if to show she was so far beyond irony she'd circled back to authenticity.

You said you didn't know how to have a grown-up relationship. Well, here's your first lesson, Maise. When it gets hard, you don't run away.

Maybe people could fall in love without an identity crisis.

That's why we're just friends," Armin said, so softly I barely heard. "She can't fall in love, and I can't fall out.

He embraced me, and said into my ear, 'I'm going to fuck the shit out of you.'
I lost my breath.
It was crude, it was unexpected, and it set me on fucking fire.

Just like in fairy tales, the wish wasn't worth the price

I'm not giving up my future for a man."
"Even a man you're in love with?"
"Even a man I'm in love with.

Strength is not in the body, it's in the mind. It doesn't lie in flexing your muscles and crushing those who oppose you. It lies in being the last one standing. By any means. At any cost.

What the hell am I? I thought. Too old to be a real teenager, too young to drink. Old enough to die in a war, fuck grown men, and be completely confused about what I was doing with my life.

Seeing someone you once loved is like falling in love for the first time all over again.

Here's a history of the world: Girl meets boy. Girl fucks boy. Girl gets scared and skips out on boy. Boy builds civilization to lure girl back.

Not a boy or a girl, not any binary, rigid definition of a person. Just my everything.

I respect people who get nerdy as fuck about something they love

You're so fucking intense. When I'm around you everything is amplified, acute. You've infected me with it. Today I got off the train early and walked home, tasted the autumn air in my mouth. Watched leaves blowing out of the trees. Felt the skeleton inside my skin, this part of me I can't see that will remain when I die, outlast me. Everything was bloody poetry. I need to numb myself a little or I'll go mad.

I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul and all that jazz.

Some girls had mothers who never called them beautiful but swore their love up and down. It's all the same, really. All bullshit.

Thanks, Dad, for leaving a huge void in my life that Freud says has to be filled with dick.

Mom used to say that if you listen, people will tell you exactly how to hurt them. Because part of us wants to be hurt. We want to know how strong we really are.

This is what being in love feels like, Wesley. Gratitude. Gratitude that you exist in this fucked-up, beautiful universe.

I think that lesson was the most important: that none of us actually grow up. We get bigger, and older, but put of us always retains that small rabbit heart, trembling furiously, secretively, with wonder and fear. There's no irony in it. No semantics or subtext. Only red blood and green grass and silver stars

Maybe I fell in love with the idea of love, but I'm a teenage girl. This morning I fell in love with raspberry jam and a puppy in a tiny raincoat. I'm not exactly Earth's top authority on the subject.

Okay, two weaknesses. I'm still supervillain material.

The funny thing was that his kiss had felt like fucking me, and his fucking me felt like being kissed, everywhere, every bit of my body unbearably warm and buzzing.

Just that. A pleasant daze. My body was full of sunlight. No blood, just liquid blue sky.

Part of loving someone is wanting them to be happy, even if it hurts you.

You're so alive, Maise. You're so here, so present in the moment. You've taught me that happiness is possible now, not in some distant future. You'll scale a mountain without a second thought, face your fears, throw yourself into danger, and you're not reckless but bold, proud. You have a lion's heart. You're not afraid to live.

Anger is like that. Runs on its own fumes, devours itself voraciously, explosively, until one day there is no fire left. Only pure, cold, unbreakable hardness. Like the diamond core in me.

I am falling in love with you, Laney Keating."
"Don't say that."
"It's true."
"Don't say it," I said miserably, looking away.
"Why?"
Falling for someone is like pulling a loose thread. It happens stitch by stitch. You feel whole most of the time even while the seams pop, the knots loosen, everything that holds you together coming undone. It feels incredible, this opening of yourself to the world. Not like the unraveling it is. Only afterward do you glance down at the tangle of string around your feet that used to be a person who was whole and self-contained and realize that love is not a thing that we create. It's an undoing.
"Because you deserve better," I whispered.

Somewhere in the universe, two hearts reached out and connected.

My love is savage and rapacious. It isn't content to touch. It wants to be inside, crawl into the marrow, caress each vein until the cells are all mixed up and there is no you and me anymore, no secrets or shadows sliding between our skin. Only this endless devouring of each other. The ouroboros we call us.

Okay, I should probably go. I don't want to stop, though. I can't stop with you. Come with me to St. Louis. Let's find happiness.

Then why'd you do it?"
"Jealousy," she said without hesitation. "It always comes down to something crude. Don't kid yourself, Keating. It's human nature.

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You drugged me," she repeated, her fingers wrapping around my neck, "with your skin, and your hands, and your mouth. You're in my veins. My blood." Her lips were a breath's width from mine, her wolf teeth bright. We teetered on the delirious brink of a kiss. "You poisoned me, and it feels so fucking good. I want more."
My breath came fast. "Will you do it with me?"
"Yeah, I will. I'll fuck this world up with you."
"Good girl," I said. "Let's be bad."
I tore off her clothes. I tore off every shred of resistance she still held. And I fucked her, wild and rough, animal, like the monsters we were.

Sometimes you feel things so much, so intensely, it becomes a new kind of numbness, the oblivion of overstimulation.

Usually the thought process for a seventeen-year-old boy went girl touching me > omg > boner.

I'm also thinking the night I met you was like someone handed me a winning lottery ticket and said, 'You can only have it if you don't tell anyone.'"
He gave me a sad smile. "I feel like that too."
"Do you start to wonder if it's even real?"
"All the time. Like maybe I made you up on that rollercoaster.