Vikki Wakefield Quotes

In our street everybody knows everybody's business. Someone will notice I rode up and walked down. Over fences and through keyholes, your business can pass like a Chinese whisper and beat you home, even if you're running.

FRESH GRIEF FEELS LIKE THIS: Your mind is a maze and every pathway leads to a bricked-up wall, the one where you can see the real world just on the other side, but you can't reach it. It's a feeling like someone's scooped out your insides with a spoon and all that's left is a shell that walks like you and talks like you, but your body and soul have parted ways for a time. Your senses don't fire and you can't connect with another human being because to string all that grief together like a strand of paper dolls would create something as powerful as an atom bomb - you'd implode. So you're all alone. And, for a short while, at least until it sinks in, you can fake anything.

How nature made its most deadly creatures alluring precisely so they could lure their victims close.

Sometimes we keep the physical objects until memory is enough

Who, being love, is poor? Oscar Wilde

You can't always make good choices. Sometimes you have to settle for making a choice you can live with.

I never would have believed I could kiss a boy that way. I thought there were only two types of kissing: the passionate, rip your clothes off kind, and the dry, chaste peck you gave an elderly person because it was expected. But there was another kind of kiss. The kind that sealed a moment in a time capsule, forever: a small moment that branded my soul.

He was looking up at the stars, but not, I think, because they were so close they seemed suspended between earth and space. He was still, not blinking, because his eyes were filling up like that dammed pool and he was trying to hold back his tears. But the water always finds a way through, even when you pile those stones high and deep - eventually it finds a way.

If I had known, would I have gone back sooner? If there was an audible reshuffle and click every time my path was altered, some Jumanji-like close-up of a game piece slotting into place, would it have changed our fate? It could have been that moment or a million before it; I'll never know.

The street looks like the set of a ghost town in an old western movie, but there are eyes everywhere.

Watching someone you love die is like driving through a fog. You know you're headed somewhere but you can't see your hand in front of your face; you're so focused on steering without crashing that you never say the things you want to say.

Some things aren't meant for this world. They're too fragile, and life breaks them.

We need our monsters to know what it is to be human.

Some kinds of crazy you make for yourself, others you inherit

Jordan Mullen is looking at me like I'm something he wants to scrape off his shoe and right then my heart breaks, but somehow beats on.

Recollection hurt so much; I could barely remember my unbroken self

Why did everyone have to be so goddamn needy?

They all count, even the wrong turns; they all add more to who you become. Nobody wants to be a one-way street. There are signposts if you cared to look.

Wrong turns just added more to who you are. I didn't know that they also add to the toll you must pay to go back.

Life was short, and if it wasn't sweet you were in the wrong place with the wrong people

Throw stones, make waves. Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

I know that this is as close as I'll ever get. He's broken in ways I'm not.

Forever chasing stars

Beginnings were always exciting.

I am afraid. I'm afraid of everything. I'm afraid of the dark, of closed-in spaces, of being alone and of getting too close. I'm afraid that I'll never again have the life I've always known, my feet in the dust and my heart full. I'm afraid of being alive; I'm afraid to die.

Moments like that, I thought maybe there was a God, a fickle puppet-master who decided it was time to remind us that life isn't just an echo of the Big Bang - that we're here, with beating hearts.

We craved new beginnings

I was hard-wired to run when I cared too much

Life is full of wrong turns and dead ends and pathways that peter out

When you're a child, what you see and hear and comprehend can be sorted into little boxes. Then, as you live and learn, all those boxes open up and become rooms. The more you experience, the bigger those rooms get. If you're lucky enough, there are some people you will love, and who will love you, long enough to see their boxes grow into vast spaces. You'll understand things that had no meaning. You'll find dark corners that only light up for the briefest moments. But when you keep getting lost, you just end up with a pile of boxes.

Where you've been isn't as important as where you're headed

This is what you wanted, I told myself. To be alone. To keep moving.

Joe might have called that place godforsaken but I could see a whole lot of proof that if there was a God, He'd been there.

The way I see it, you have two options. Run, run like hell, or dive in

Growing up is made up of a million small moments in time, and one of the most painful is the moment you're severed from the whole, when you realize that your parent is complicated and fallible and human.

It takes time to believe again