It Ends with Us (It Ends with Us, #1)

by Colleen Hoover

“I feel like everyone fakes who they really are, when deep down we’re all equal amounts of screwed up. Some of us are just better at hiding it than others.”

“I don’t know. Something you aren’t proud of. Something that will make me feel a little less screwed up on the inside.”

“There is no such thing as bad people. We’re all just people who sometimes do bad things.”

Where is a marine-grade polymer chair when I need one?!

I am a brave and bold businesswoman with zero fucks to give for men in scrubs.

“How thoughtful of you, Lily.”

He’s acting like there’s actually something between us, and we’ve never even kissed!

Plants need to be loved the right way in order to survive. So do humans.

“If we’re neglected, we end up homeless and incapable of anything meaningful.”

“We’re just alike,” he said, repeating himself from earlier. “Plants and humans?” I asked. He shook his head. “No. Me and you.”

When he was wiping that cow shit on me, it was quite possibly the most turned-on I have ever been.

I just kept thinking about our country and the whole world and how screwed up it is that people don’t do more for each other. I don’t know when humans started only looking out for themselves. Maybe it’s always been this way.

Instead of helping others, people use the worst-case scenarios to excuse their own selfishness and greed.

“You warned me. You said one time with you wouldn’t be enough. You said you were like a drug. But you failed to tell me you were the most addictive kind.”

but then I wonder if maybe he’s doing this just to please me. If maybe he’s doing things he doesn’t really want to do just because he knows I want a relationship. And then I smile even bigger, because isn’t that what it’s all about? Sacrificing for the person you like so that you can see them happy?

“We’re doomed. There’s just too much drive and success between the two of us.”

“That means the honeymoon phase will last until we’re eighty,”

I’m not growing up in a household with a great example of how a man should treat someone he loves, so I’ve always held on to an unhealthy amount of distrust when it comes to relationships and other people.

“You’re already my favorite person but now you’re making it really unfair to all the other humans because no one will ever be able to catch up to you.”

“Everything is almost better in Boston. Except the girls. Boston doesn’t have you.”

I was worried that being in a relationship would add to my responsibilities. That’s why I’ve avoided them my whole life. I already have enough on my plate, and seeing the stress my parents’ marriage seemed to cause them, and the failed marriages of some of my friends, I wanted no part in something like that. But after tonight, I realized that maybe a lot of people are just doing it wrong. Because what’s happening between us doesn’t feel like a responsibility. It feels like a reward. And I’ll fall asleep wondering what I did to deserve it.

“Don’t tempt the scorpion if you don’t want to get stung.”

All humans make mistakes. What determines a person’s character aren’t the mistakes we make. It’s how we take those mistakes and turn them into lessons rather than excuses.

think about how sometimes, no matter how convinced you are that your life will turn out a certain way, all that certainty can be washed away with a simple change in tide.

He seemed so happy and there was a light in his eyes that I’d never seen there before. Like he’d finally found his home.

knew what he was saying. That he was leaving for the military and he didn’t want me to hold on to him while he was gone. He wasn’t really breaking up with me because we weren’t ever really together. We’d just been two people who helped each other when we needed it and got our hearts fused together along the way.

I’m not sure why, because I could easily love him that way. I think maybe under normal circumstances, if we were together like typical teenagers and he had an average life with a home, we could be that kind of couple. The kind who comes together so easily and never experiences a life where cruelty sometimes intercepts.

Imagine all the people you meet in your life. There are so many. They come in like waves, trickling in and out with the tide. Some waves are much bigger and make more of an impact than others. Sometimes the waves bring with them things from deep in the bottom of the sea and they leave those things tossed onto the shore. Imprints against the grains of sand that prove the waves had once been there, long after the tide recedes.

Preventing your heart from forgiving someone you love is actually a hell of a lot harder than simply forgiving them.

Allysa drops onto the couch beside me and Rylee. “I miss you so much, Lily,” she says. “I’m thinking about coming back to work a day or two a week.”