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

by Colleen Hoover

sometimes you can’t control where your mind goes. You just have to train it not to go there anymore.

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

Plants reward you based on the amount of love you show them. If you’re cruel to them or neglect them, they give you nothing. But if you care for them and love them the right way, they reward you with gifts in the form of vegetables or fruits or flowers.”

“We’re just alike,” he said. My eyes flicked to his. “Me and you?” He shook his head. “No. Plants and humans. Plants need to be loved the right way in order to survive. So do humans. We rely on our parents from birth to love us enough to keep us alive. And if our parents show us the right kind of love, we turn out as better humans overall. But if we’re neglected…” His voice grew quiet. Almost sad. He wiped his hands on his knees, trying to get some of the dirt off. “If we’re neglected, we end up homeless and incapable of anything meaningful.”

“You see that tree over there?” In the middle of the row of trees was an oak tree that stood taller than all the rest of the trees. Atlas glanced over at it and dragged his eyes all the way up to the top of the tree. “It grew on its own,” I said. “Most plants do need a lot of care to survive. But some things, like trees, are strong enough to do it by just relying on themselves and nobody else.”

Ellen, I am confident that the next sentence I am about to write has never been written or spoken aloud before. When he was wiping that cow shit on me, it was quite possibly the most turned-on I have ever been.

all this time I thought homeless people were homeless because they were lazy or drug addicts or just didn’t want to work like other people. But now I know that’s not true. Sure, some of what he said was true to an extent, but he was using the worst-case scenarios. Not everyone is homeless because they choose to be. They’re homeless because there isn’t enough help to go around. And people like my father are the problem. Instead of helping others, people use the worst-case scenarios to excuse their own selfishness and greed.

Maybe love isn’t something that comes full circle. It just ebbs and flows, in and out, just like the people in our lives.

Sometimes even grown women need their mother’s comfort so we can just take a break from having to be strong all the time.

It’s easy when we’re on the outside to believe that we would walk away without a second thought if a person mistreated us. It’s easy to say we couldn’t continue to love someone who mistreats us when we aren’t the ones feeling the love of that person. When you experience it firsthand, it isn’t so easy to hate the person who mistreats you when most of the time they’re your godsend.