Nova Ren Suma Quotes

In reality I was a pencil drawing of a photocopy of a Polaroid of my sister- you could see the resemblance in a certain light if you were seeking it out because I told you first if you were being nice.

Life. We'd long known it was cruel.

I could see her smile. I wished I hadn't because it was the kind of smile she never gave to me. It was a smile for a boy who wanted to know her and never would. A smile for a girl who wanted to be like her and never could be. A smile for a perfect stranger.

This is how I know blood is meaningless family connections are a lot like old gum -you don't have to keep chewing. You can always spit it out and stick it under the table. You can walk away.

Ruby told me it didn't matter what a boy was thinking about you so long as you had a good hold on what you were thinking about him.

I was an echo of her.

We kept forgetting. And we also couldn't let go.

When people decide there's ugliness inside you, they'll be looking to find it on your face.

I stared down the wall, which did not stare back at me. I wouldn't let her rattle me. The cart barely had any books on it, and the ones there were just tossed on, upside down, disorganized. It hurt to look.

None of our parents saw what we could see, which had us decide that growing up into adulthood must mean going blind.

Ruby's stories didn't have morals. They meant one thing in the light and one thing in the dark and another thing entirely when she was wearing sunglasses.

Most people, in the end, really are all on their own.

She wasn't getting it. They never teased her. They never followed her around with their phones, trying to catch her in a compromising position. They never called her a ho-bag or a troll or said she danced like an elephant on crank. They never, not once, dribbled pee in her ballet bag or stuck shaved pubes in her ChapStick. They never told her she wouldn't ever be good enough to make the New York City Ballet, and that they'd wave to her from the stage, maybe, one day, if they remembered who she was when they were famous.

The other two weren't even dancers. They were football players. Which was ridiculous.

The story you choose to tell isn't always the story you believe.

To fit in somewhere in the world, even if there were chains and gates and fences to keep us from running.

There was something to be said for the bodiless feeling that came after the cold. Something I would always remember. When you forget how bad it hurts, you feel so free.

Weren't we all, from girl to guard, from criminal to civilian? We wanted a glimpse at the monster inside. We thought we could catch a peek sometimes, a shiftiness in the eyes maybe. A rumble.

Each of us had our own monster, distinct ous. We were all different, one girl to the next, like snowflakes.

Laughing (they thought we were laughing at them). Walking fast (they thought we were running).

It wasn't locked at all, was it? All I had to do was push.

Home is where the heart is, and where the hell is, and where the hate is, and where the hopelessness is. Which made Aurora Hills pretty much like home.

But no, it's not the Ori I knew. It's an Ori I never knew. The Ori I made her into.

I knew that just because people on the outside were free and clean, it didn't mean they were the good ones.

Sometimes a perfect memory can be ruined if put to words.

It was the most private thing we had left - held even closer than our bodies, because our bodies were searched, all holes and crevices and cavities in every horrible way that could be imagined. But no one could shake out the truth from inside us. They couldn't search us for that.
Our guilt and our innocence were only our own, and she should know to keep it that way.

Sometimes it could be the smallest thing that could topple over a whole life, and, in the end, destroy it.

Teenage girls know more than we're given credit for. We sense danger even when everyone's telling us it's fine, he's a perfectly nice man, an upstanding member of our community, have you tasted his sugar-cream pie?

What I mean is, it reminded me of one of the happiest moments of childhood, before broken wrists and purpling bruises and nasty names hissed when my mother's back was turned. Before Who do you think you are? You're ugly. You're nobody.

She'd gone quiet now. She wasn't telling. She was learning to keep her one true secret, and she'd learned that from me.

I wonder who drove all the way up here to leave this piece of hate mail for the dead.

Some of us had been running all our lives. We ran because we could and because we could not. We ran for our lives. We still thought they were worth running for.

The point is, every book we had could save us in a different way
only, we had to open it. We had to drop our eyes to the page and drink in the words that were there.

I could tell he wanted the best for me. Of course, he assumed that would be getting out. Everyone always thought that, not of what we had to go back to, at home. Maybe our parents had thrown away our mattresses. Maybe they'd told our siblings we'd been run over by trains, to make our absence fonder.
Not everyone had a parent. It could be that nothing was waiting for us. Our keys would no longer fit the locks. We'd resort to ringing the bell, saying we've come home, can't we come in?
The eye in the peephole would show itself, and that eye could belong to a stranger, as our family had moved halfway across the country and never informed us. Or that eye could belong to the woman who carried us for nine months, who labored for fourteen hours, who was sliced open with a C-section to give us life, and now wished she never did.
The juvenile correctional system could let us out into the world, but it could not control who would be out there, willing to claim us.

My own drawing was a house made of books, but where there should have been a door, there was a book, and where there should have been windows, there were books, and where the chimney should have been open to let the smoke out, a book was covering the hole, so if anyone was in the house, they couldn't get out. They'd suffocate, to be found years later, a desiccated corpse still marking its place in the book it had been reading with a knobby finger bone, head caved in by an avalanche of fallen books. As I said, I liked books.

Maybe, long ago, we used to be good. Maybe all little girls are good in the beginning.

I changed with my back to her, aware of her body moving, breathing. Aware of what bodies were capable of, which was betrayal and lies.

But when I asked where the extra doors led,Ruby smiled and said sometimes you need more than oneway to reach the outside ...

What were we trying to do, kill ourselves and everyone around us? But we were children then, and we were just figuring out how to live. The car finished its U-Turn and headed back for the road. I laughed. I believed in writing down my future, but I didn't know to keep an eye on hers.

We understand how that can make a girl crumble.

I was looking back into memories I didn't own, wanting in.

This is called closure, and it's also called justice, and they are not always the same thing.

Our private tastes in books showed a hint of our secret selves.

There are no mourners here. No tourists. No rubberneckers. No one to sideswipe Tommy's car.

It was Ruby's favorite kind of story: where the boys lost and the girls won and got a souvenir in the bargain.

Probably she died. Consumption. Fever. Mountain lion. I don't know.

But then the stage showed other things. Bad things. Murderous things. Things I would never really do. And things I would forget about in the morning, because I'd wake up feeling a whole lot better. I knew right from wrong, Ori and I both did. We were not terrible people. We were not fools.

It was hoped we might have two lives - the way cats are said to have nine. This life we ruined, and another, for after.