Courtney Summers Quotes

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. ~ Courtney Summers

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. ~ Courtney Summers

I hate the people who live here. May Beth always told me I can't do that; I can't hate people for having more than me, but she's wrong. I can. I do. ~ Courtney Summers

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. ~ Courtney Summers

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

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

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. ~ Courtney Summers

Anyway," Jake says. I turn back to him. "I just wanted to start over a good note, that's all."
I have to put this poor guy out of his misery. "Look, Jake, I'm not in the market for –" I almost say a boyfriend, which is true, but this is even truer: "People". ~ Courtney Summers

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. ~ Courtney Summers

You only get to walk variations of the same lines everyone has already drawn for you. ~ Courtney Summers

Thank you for visiting! Come again!
Fuck this place. ~ Courtney Summers

Carving out our own place, making something out of nothing. It feels as right as it doesn't and I think maybe I was wrong. We can't have exactly everything we lost. But maybe we can come close. ~ Courtney Summers

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. ~ Courtney Summers

But just because something starts out sweet doesn't mean it won't push itself so far past anything you could call sweet anymore. And if it all starts like this, how do you see what's coming? ~ Courtney Summers

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! ~ Courtney Summers

It's hard to think of someone so vulnerable and alone. It's hard to think of her, so vulnerable and alone. ~ Courtney Summers

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

He slings his arm around my shoulder. I feel the question after he does it. -Is this okay?- I don't think it is. I don't know how to fold myself into him in any way that feels right. ~ Courtney Summers

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. ~ Courtney Summers

It was a terrible thing, sure, but we live in a world that has no shortage of terrible things. You can't stop for all of them. ~ Courtney Summers

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

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. ~ Courtney Summers

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. ~ Courtney Summers

There is nothing like discovering your own secrets in someone else's story. Those thoughts and feelings you believed were too ugly or strange or idealistic or desperate or whimsical or hungry or sad they had to be just you because there could be no other place for them, anywhere. Books that make you realize you're not alone, you never were. Those are the ones I like best. ~ Courtney Summers

I have never seen a more desperate symbol of hope since the world ended and I've never felt the world more desperate to make a mockery of it. ~ Courtney Summers

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. ~ Courtney Summers

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. ~ Courtney Summers

He's the boy who stopped and I'm the girl he stopped for and what happens to her, if he goes away? ~ Courtney Summers

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. ~ Courtney Summers

I hope I'm the ghost that belongs to her. ~ Courtney Summers

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

Or maybe you get so used to the mess of home, you convince yourself over time everything's exactly where it belongs. ~ Courtney Summers

It's kind of like stumbling upon the scene of an accident. Once you've looked, you're part of it. Especially if you walk away. ~ Courtney Summers

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

I was perfect... and then I wasn't. ~ Courtney Summers

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. ~ Courtney Summers

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. ~ Courtney Summers

I remind myself it's nothing I have to hold or be held to. ~ Courtney Summers

Maybe the only way our story can end is varying degrees of sad. ~ Courtney Summers

And that I miss her, that I need her, and this kind of missing, this kind of need, the kind of emptiness it leaves behind is worse than waking up one day and finding the whole world has collapsed in on itself, that I was over longer before it was. ~ Courtney Summers

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

You think I ever stopped wanting to die after the motel?" I ask. "You think a feeling like that just goes away? ~ Courtney Summers

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

My hands are dying. ~ Courtney Summers

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. ~ Courtney Summers

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. ~ Courtney Summers

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. ~ Courtney Summers

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. ~ Courtney Summers

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. ~ Courtney Summers

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. ~ Courtney Summers

The fall takes no time and forever. ~ Courtney Summers

I wish I could break this window. Step through it. But I can't break this window. I can't even find some less dramatic way to die inside of this school, like hanging myself or slitting my wrists, because what would they do with my body? It might put everyone at risk. I won't let myself do that.
I'm not selfish like Lily.
I hate her. I hate her so much my heart tries to crawl out of my throat but it gets stuck there and beats crazily in the too narrow space. I bring my hands to my neck and try to massage it back down. I pres so heard against the skin, my eyes sting, and then I'm hurrying back down the stairs, back to the first floor. I think of Trace running laps, something he can control. ~ Courtney Summers

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. ~ Courtney Summers

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

I don't know how I'm going to do this, move through the hours like someone who wants to still be breathing when I had so firmly made up my mind to stop. ~ Courtney Summers

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. ~ Courtney Summers

When this is over, society will need entertainment to get past it. We'll make movies about it, hundreds of movies, and in every one of them, we'll be the heroes and the love interests and best friends and winners and we'll watch these movies until we are so far removed from our own history, we'll forget how it really felt to be here. ~ Courtney Summers

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. ~ Courtney Summers

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. ~ Courtney Summers

This is not a test. Listen closely. This is not a test."
But I think she's wrong. I think this is a test.
It has to be. ~ Courtney Summers

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

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. ~ Courtney Summers

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. ~ Courtney Summers

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. ~ Courtney Summers

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. ~ Courtney Summers

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

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. ~ Courtney Summers

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. ~ Courtney Summers

You think you know someone and you don't. I mean… I don't know. You could all be jumpers. Wrist slitters. OD'ers. Stand in front of a train. I had no idea my dad was suicidal. ~ Courtney Summers

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

Do you have a credit card or something?" I ask because who wouldn't have a credit card handy during the zombie fucking apocalypse. ~ Courtney Summers

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

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. ~ Courtney Summers

No, you're a work of art. ~ Courtney Summers

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. ~ Courtney Summers

There's always this one girl. She's desperate and she's weird and she's jealous, and you're stuck with her, no matter how hard you try to get her off your back. Just throw some really fucked-up self-esteem issues into the mix and you have Kara. ~ Courtney Summers

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? ~ Courtney Summers

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. ~ Courtney Summers

...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. ~ Courtney Summers

Touching me without permission. There should be a death penalty for that. ~ Courtney Summers

I wonder if, even after all of this, he understands how fragile good things are in my hands and how many times they've been taken away from me. ~ Courtney Summers

I don't know why it's the girls who always seem to have to take on that kind of burden. ~ Courtney Summers

Funny how the last thing we want the world to see is almost the first thing to show. ~ Courtney Summers

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. ~ Courtney Summers

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. ~ Courtney Summers

I move closer to the glass, as close as I can get to it, begging her, begging Lily, begging Grace, begging all of them to tell me what's left, to just tell me while the girl pushes against the window, turns her tiny hands into tiny fists, begging me for a taste of - life.
My life.
Lily disappears. Grace. They all leave, they're gone, they will never be here again. But the wright of what they've shown me is settling into my bones. I don't know if I will keep it, but just in this moment, however brief, I feel closer to it that I ever have before ...
The dead girl presses her face against the glass. She wait for me to tell her what's next. ~ Courtney Summers

I've been variations of hurt my whole life. ~ Courtney Summers

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. ~ Courtney Summers

I have never been kissed the way I want to be kissed and I have never been touched the way I want to be touched. I don't often let myself think of it, but ever since I saw that video, I can't seem to stop. ~ Courtney Summers

The repeat is always the killer. Everything inside you goes into saying the word once, but sorry is the kind of word the person you say it to always wants to hear twice. ~ Courtney Summers

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. ~ Courtney Summers

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. ~ Courtney Summers

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

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

I am so sad. I am so sad it makes me heavier than the sum of my parts. I shift, restless, but it doesn't help. It's like - time. All this time in here is on me, has its hooks in me. Maybe if I sleep more, I'll wake up and I'll feel different, but I can't. The storm is really happening now and it makes the room feel emptier. Makes me feel emptier. ~ Courtney Summers

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. ~ Courtney Summers

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

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. ~ Courtney Summers

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. ~ Courtney Summers

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. ~ Courtney Summers