"When you love someone, you don't want to hurt them, even if they deserve to be hurt. When you love someone, you want to hurt them, even when they don't deserve to be hurt."
— Ellen Hopkins (Glass)

"Love means holding on to someone just as hard as you can because if you don't, one blink and they might disappear...forever."
— Ellen Hopkins (Impulse)

"Act
on your impulse,
swallow the bottle,
cut a little deeper,
put the gun to your chest."
— Ellen Hopkins

"I hate this feeling. Like I'm here, but I'm not. Like someone cares. But they don't. Like I belong somewhere else, anywhere but here, and escape lies just past that snowy window, cool and crisp as the February air. I considered the streets beyond, bleak as the bleached bones of wilderness scaffolding my heart. Just a stone's throw away."
— Ellen Hopkins

"Grandma once told me it's easy to overthink love, to dissect it and question it until it is no more."
— Ellen Hopkins (Impulse)

"It [death] chokes you, gags you, but you have to pretend that you're doing just fine, not trembling with this fear because the end is close."
— Ellen Hopkins (Impulse)

"Wish you could turn off the questions, turn off the voices, turn off all sound.
Yearn to close out the ugliness, close out the filthiness, close out all light.
Long to cast away yesterday, cast away memory, cast away all jeapordy.
Pray you could somehow stop uncertainty, somehow stop the loathing, somehow stop the pain.
Act on your impulse, swallow the bottle, cut a little deeper, put the gun to your chest."
— Ellen Hopkins

"Memory is a tenuous thing, like a rainbow's end or a camera with a failing lens."
— Ellen Hopkins

""you come home, and everyone talks at once and everyone asks questions, but no one waits for the answers.Instead they talk about themselves, what they've been up to, what they're going to do next,       as if you're a photo on the wall.And then they talk to one another, forgetting you've jsut flown in, forgetting you're in the backseat, forgetting they've already said it all.""
— Ellen Hopkins (Crank)

"Forever has no meaning when you're living in the moment. I wasn't ready for that moment to end."
— Ellen Hopkins

"Memory is a tenuous thing. . . .

flickering glimpses, blue
and white, like ancient,
decomposing 16mm film.
Happiness escapes
me there, where faces
are vague and yesterday
seems to come tied
up in ribbons of pain.

Happiness? I look for it intead
in today, where memory
is something I can still
touch, still rely on.
I find it in the smiles
of new friends, the hope
blossoming inside.

My happiest memories
have no place in the
past; they are those
I have yet to create."
— Ellen Hopkins (Impulse)

"you fly until you crash two days
two nights
no sleep,
no food,
come down off the monster
YOU CRASH REAL HARD"
— Ellen Hopkins (Crank)

""Think of how they must have loved when all they had was each other.""
— Ellen Hopkins

""he sucked the nectar from her heart like a famished butterfly." "
— Ellen Hopkins

"I mean who wants to trudge through life, doing everything just right? Taking no chances means wasting your dreams."
— Ellen Hopkins

"Have you ever had so much to say that your mouth closed up tight struggling to harness the nuclear force coalescing within your words? Have you ever had so many thoughts churning inside you that you didn’t dare let them escape in case they blew you wide open? Have you ever been so angry that you couldn’t look in the mirror for fear of finding the face of evil glaring back at you?"
— Ellen Hopkins (Crank)

"So you try to think of someone else your'e mad at, and the unavoidable answer pops into your little warped brain: everyone."
— Ellen Hopkins

"When you were little, endure your parents’ warnings, then wait for them to leave the room, pry loose protective covers and consider inserting some metal object into an electrical outlet?

Did you wonder if for once you might light up the room?

When you were big enough to cross the street on your own, did you ever wait for a signal, hear the frenzied approach of a fire truck and feel like stepping out in front of it?

Did you wonder just how far that rocket ride might take you?

When you were almost grown, did you ever sit in a bubble bath, perspiration pooling, notice a blow dryer plugged in within easy reach, and think about dropping it into the water?

Did you wonder if the expected rush might somehow fail you?

And now, do you ever dangle your toes over the precipice, dare the cliff to crumble, defy the frozen deity to suffer the sun, thaw feather and bone, take wing to fly you home?"
— Ellen Hopkins (Burned)

""empty and closed, hovering in some frozen netherworld neither sun nor rain could thaw.""
— Ellen Hopkins (Crank)

" The Screaming
flashed me back
to a time
when mom and dad
were still together
if you could call
miles apart together."
— Ellen Hopkins (Crank)

"This time when we kiss, I feel it in the pit of my stomach, I feel it in my heart. And I realize love isn't about sex. It's about connection."
— Ellen Hopkins

"I tattered their wings and tore off their legs, joint by joint, watched them crawl in circles, like little lost infants, untill they decide to die."
— Ellen Hopkins (Impulse)

""Life is all about change. If it were static, think about how boring it would be. You can't be afraid of it, and you can't worry that you'll mess things up. You deserve good things, and I want to be one of them."
Ellen Hopkins (impulse)"
— Ellen Hopkins

"Smile. Nod. Say
something witty
before he finds
out what an incredible
geek you are."
— Ellen Hopkins (Crank)

"Act
on your impulse,
swallow the bottle,
cut a little deeper,
put the gun to your chest.

"
— Ellen Hopkins (Impulse)

"One foot in front of the other, counting tiles on the floor so I don't have to focus the blur of painted smiles, fake faces."
— Ellen Hopkins

""We used to do coke, till "Just Say No" put the stuff out of reach. Now it's crank. Meth. The monster. It's a bitch on the body, but damn do you fly." "
— Ellen Hopkins (Crank)

""Alone, there is only the person inside. I've grown to like her better than the stuck-up husk of me. Alone, there is no perfect daughter, no gifted high school junior, no Kristina Georgia Snow. There is only Bree." (Ellen Hopkins) "
— Ellen Hopkins (Crank)

"Funny thing, your brain,
how it always functions on one
level or another. How, even stuck in
some sort of subconcious limbo, it works
your lungs, your muscle twitches, your heart,
in fact, in symphony with your heart, allowing it
to feel love. Pain. Jealousy. Guilt. I wonder if it’s the
same for people, lost in comas. Is there really such a thing"
— Ellen Hopkins (Crank)

""The monster likes to talk; he jumps into your head and opens your mouth, making it spout your deepest darkest deceptions. Making you say all the things you'd rather not say, at least not in mixed company." (Ellen Hopkins)"
— Ellen Hopkins (Crank)

"

Sometimes you're traveling a highway, the only road you've ever known and wham! A semi comes from nowhere and rolls right over you. Sometimes you dont wake up. But if you happen to you know things will never be the same. Sometimes that's not so bad. Sometimes lives instersect, no rhyme, no reason, except, perhaps, for a passing semi."
— Ellen Hopkins (Impulse)

"How could I share the
way my heart was breaking
when my confessor
didn’t believe"
— Ellen Hopkins (Crank)

"You can have your pick of pretty women. Why me?
You're like the ocean, Pattyn. Pretty enough on the surface, but dive down into your depths, you'll find beauty most people never see. Lucky me. I fell in, headfirst."
— Ellen Hopkins

"Too much to take in, too much to purge. Why must every memory, once sweet, dead end in such ugliness?"
— Ellen Hopkins (Impulse)

"Can a dream be wrong? Aren't dreams God's way of telling you things?"
— Ellen Hopkins

"So when he asked about getting high, I didn't think, I agreed. We smoked some good California green. Took three tries to put me in the place he said I should be."
— Ellen Hopkins

"My life is over.
My one forever love has
been snatched away,
condemned by my own
father's rules to die,
just because he loved me.

I am without a home,
without a single person to love.
And after having
discovered love, lived for a short
while surrounded by love,
that is to much to bear.

I am a pariah, at church,
at school. The few people
I once called friends have
betrayed me and caused
the death of my husband,
our innocent child.

And so they should die too.
All of them. Dad. Bishop
Crandall. Trevor, Becca, Emily.
With the pull of a 10mm hair
trigger, their lives will end at sacrament meeting.
Such lovely irony!

And when I finish there,
I'll hide in the desert,
reload, and go in search
of Carmen and Tiffany,
who started the rumors.
And Derek, just because."
— Ellen Hopkins

"Have you ever once in your life reached out to touch infinity?"
— Ellen Hopkins

"...imperfections create character..."
— Ellen Hopkins

"Face red, but brave in spite of it, Ethan offered an even smaller box. My hands shook as i opened it.

Set in a gold promise ring, three small diamonds glittered. One for you, one for me, one for us, he said sweetly. I love you."
— Ellen Hopkins

"Did you ever, when you were little, endure your parents' warnings, then wait for them to leave the room, pry loose protective covers and consider inserting some metal object into an electrical outlet? Did you ever wonder if for once you might light up the whole room? When you were big enough to cross the street on your own, did you ever wait for a signal, hear the frenzied approach of a fire truck and feel like stepping out in front of it? Did you wonder just how far the rocket ride might take you? When you were almost grown, did you ever sit in a bubble bath, perspiration pooling, notice a blow-dryer plugged in within reach, and think about dropping it into the water? Did you wonder if the expected rush might somehow fail you? And now, do you ever dangle your toes over the precipice, dare the cliff to crumble, defy the frozen deity to suffer the sun, thaw feather and bone, take wing to fly you home? I, Pattyn Scarlet Von Stratten, do."
— Ellen Hopkins

"It didn't matter in the end how old they had been, or that they were girls, but only that we had loved them, and that they hadn't heard us calling, still do not hear us, up here in the tree house with our thinning hair and soft bellies, calling them out of those rooms where they went to be alone for all time, alone in suicide, which is deeper than death, and where we will never find the pieces to put them back together. "
— Jeffrey Eugenides (The Virgin Suicides)

"We felt the imprisonment of being a girl, the way it made your mind active and dreamy, and how you ended up knowing which colors went together. We knew that the girls were our twins, that we all existed in space like animals with identical skins, and that they knew everything about us though we couldn’t fathom them at all. We knew, finally, that the girls were really women in disguise, that they understood love and even death, and that our job was merely to create the noise that seemed to fascinate them."
— Jeffrey Eugenides (The Virgin Suicides)

"We couldn't imagine the emptiness of a creature who put a razor to her wrists and opened her veins, the emptiness and the calm."
— Jeffrey Eugenides (The Virgin Suicides)

"Dr. Armonson stitched up her wrist wounds. Withen 5 minutes of the transfusion he declared her out of danger. Chucking her under the chin, he said, "What are you doing here, honey? Your not even old enough to know how bad life gets." And it was then Cecelia gave orally what was to be her only form of suicide note, and a useless one at that, because she was going to live: "Obviously, Doctor," she said, "you've never been a 13 year old girl.""
— Jeffrey Eugenides (The Virgin Suicides)

"Basically what we have here is a dreamer. Somebody out of touch with reality. When she jumped, she probably thought she'd fly"
— Jeffrey Eugenides (The Virgin Suicides)

"The seeds of death get lost in the mess that God made us."
— Jeffrey Eugenides (The Virgin Suicides)

"We felt the imprisonment of being a girl, the way it made your mind active and dreamy, and how you ended up knowing which colors went together. We knew that the girls were our twins, that we all existed in space like animals with identical skins, and that they knew everything about us though we couldn’t fathom them at all. We knew, finally, that the girls were really women in disguise, that they understood love and even death, and that our job was merely to create the noise that seemed to fascinate them."
— Jeffrey Eugenides (The Virgin Suicides)

"I don’t know what you’re feeling, I won’t even pretend"
— Jeffrey Eugenides (The Virgin Suicides)

"We realized that the version of the world they rendered for us was not the version of the world they really believed in..."
— Jeffrey Eugenides (The Virgin Suicides)