Annie Reads > Annie's Quotes

“There’s a spell that comes over us in our youth,” Dotty says. “We chase after things that we know aren’t good for us”
― Tasha Coryell, Love Letters to a Serial Killer

“Keep the secret for a few days, in order to hold something warm and soft in your heart, all alone.”
― Hildur Knútsdóttir, The Night Guest

“I’m considering writing something disgusting back. Something nasty. That he is embarrassingly poor in bed and that I have HIV and herpes and hepatitis and that I came across his wife swimming and told her everything in front of his children and that I’ve called the police and told them that he pushed me down the stairs. But I decide to wait until I’ve come up with something truly repulsive. Less is more and all that. It’s been my experience so far that it’s always better to sleep a little on such poisoned darts, before you let them fly.”
― Hildur Knútsdóttir, The Night Guest

“Art, the creation of true art, required some mysterious, innate ability to thrive in chaos. Or that was her opinion. To be able to see and understand and feel dozens of shapes and textures of emotions at one time.”
― Nora Roberts, Key of Light

“There was no joy or innocence here, however. The tone was dark, a kind of grieving, with the only light, pale, pale light,”
― Nora Roberts, Key of Light

“For anyone who has ever been told their spark shouldn’t burn so bright and for all the people who loved them precisely because it did.”
― Penn Cole, Spark of the Everflame

“It’s never the enemy who attacks outright who will strike your killing blow, he’d taught me. It’s the one who hides in the shadows and waits. The one who strikes when you’ve finally looked away. Those are the true predators to fear.”
― Penn Cole, Spark of the Everflame

“This is Annabel. The daughter of Rachel Price. That last part said in a knowing whisper. Because even though Rachel was gone, everything existed only in relation to her. Gorham wasn’t its own place anymore; it was the town where Rachel Price had lived.”
― Holly Jackson, The Reappearance of Rachel Price

“Everyone left, eventually. Wasn’t just Rachel Price. People were temporary. It was the one thing you could count on: people always left,”
― Holly Jackson, The Reappearance of Rachel Price

“Never take anything you haven’t earned, my father used to say. You always end up paying for it one way or another.”
― Riley Sager, Lock Every Door

“Every so often, life offers you a reset button. When it does, you need to press it as hard as you can.”
― Riley Sager, Lock Every Door

“Grief is tricky like that. It can lie low for hours, long enough for magical thinking to take hold. Then, when you’re good and vulnerable, it will leap out at you like a fun-house skeleton, and all the pain you thought was gone comes roaring back.”
― Riley Sager, Home Before Dark

“Because here’s the thing about being poor—most people don’t understand it unless they’ve been there themselves. They don’t know what a fragile balancing act it is to stay afloat and that if, God forbid, you momentarily slip underwater, how hard it is to resurface.”
― Riley Sager, Lock Every Door

“I still had cheese left when Max disappeared. If I had known it was the last cheese, I would’ve made it last longer. I would’ve kept it in the fridge until it grew moldy and then I would’ve eaten it anyway. To risk food poisoning for a person was a true sign of love.”
― Tasha Coryell, Love Letters to a Serial Killer

“My parents love a version of me that doesn’t exist.”
― Tasha Coryell, Love Letters to a Serial Killer

“Nothing lasts forever. Not the good things, not the bad. So just find what makes you happy, and do it for as long as you can.”
― Ashley Poston, The Seven Year Slip

“Sometimes the people you loved left you halfway through a story. Sometimes they left you without a goodbye. And, sometimes, they stayed around in little ways. In the memory of a musical. In the smell of their perfume. In the sound of the rain, and the itch for adventure, and the yearning for that liminal space between one airport terminal and the next. I hated her for leaving, and I loved her for staying as long as she could. And I would never wish this pain on anyone.”
― Ashley Poston, The Seven Year Slip

“The opposite of depression is not happiness, but vitality and my life, as I write this, is vital even when sad. I may wake up sometime next year without my mind again; it is not likely to stick around all the time. Meanwhile, however, I have discovered what I would have to call a soul, a part of myself I could never have imagined until one day, seven years ago, when hell came to pay me a surprise visit. It's a precious discovery. Almost every day I feel momentary flashes of hopelessness and wonder every time whether I am slipping. For a petrifying instant here and there, a lightning-quick flash, I want a car to run me over...I hate these feelings but, but I know that they have driven me to look deeper at life, to find and cling to reasons for living, I cannot find it in me to regret entirely the course my life has taken. Every day, I choose, sometimes gamely, and sometimes against the moment's reason, to be alive. Is that not a rare joy?”
― Andrew Solomon, The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression

“You only live once. And if you do it right, once is all you need.”
― Ashley Poston, The Seven Year Slip

“My aunt used to say, if you don't fit in, fool everyone until you do.

She also said to keep your passport renewed, to pair red wines with meat and whites with everything else, to find work that is fulfilling to your heart as well as your head, to never forget to fall in love whenever you can find it because love is nothing if not a matter of timing, and to chase the moon. Always, always chase the moon.”
― Ashley Poston, The Seven Year Slip

“Howdy, friend,” she said. She stopped suddenly, midjog, in my front yard. “Oh, maybe I shouldn’t say ‘howdy.’ Wasn’t the name of the demon in The Exorcist Captain Howdy?”
― Maureen Kilmer, Suburban Hell

“Men are always killing women during dates. She doesn’t look like her picture in the dating app? Dead. She tries to leave the date early? Dead. She doesn’t want to have sex? Dead. She does everything right? Dead.”
― Tasha Coryell, Love Letters to a Serial Killer

“It was silly that as an adult, a person needed to become obsessed with a serial killer in order to make new friends. I hadn’t told them that William was my boyfriend.”
― Tasha Coryell, Love Letters to a Serial Killer

“the woman on the stand, she seemed a perfect kind of victim—beautiful and easy for him to access. Maybe he cared for her too much or not enough for her to die. I couldn’t decide whether to be jealous of her because of her closeness with William or relieved that she was still living as proof that William could spend time with a woman without needing her to die.”
― Tasha Coryell, Love Letters to a Serial Killer

“I was always misreading the things that men wanted from me.”
― Tasha Coryell, Love Letters to a Serial Killer

“I wish I could buy you flowers and diamonds. I wish I could hold you at night as you fall asleep. I wish that I could make promises that I could keep.”
― Tasha Coryell, Love Letters to a Serial Killer

“I worry that the mystery is what attracts me to you and that if/when I find out the truth, I’ll lose interest the same way that men lose interest in me when they find out that I’m an ordinary, boring girl.”
― Tasha Coryell, Love Letters to a Serial Killer

“I think I like it that you’re violent. There’s a part of me that likes the suspense of being with someone that could hurt me at any moment.”
― Tasha Coryell, Love Letters to a Serial Killer

“Sometimes I think about what it would be like if you killed me. It’s about the mourning rather than the death itself, like my life would have more meaning to it in retrospect. Think about all the people that would confess their love for me if I were no longer around to hold them accountable.”
― Tasha Coryell, Love Letters to a Serial Killer

“Millennials don’t talk on the phone,” I’d told her once, which she found ridiculous. She hadn’t left a voicemail after that last call, which meant that I never found out what she wanted and I didn’t bother calling her back.”
― Tasha Coryell, Love Letters to a Serial Killer