Paige Barhoover > Paige's Quotes

“There's something dangerous about the boredom of teenage girls.”
― Megan Abbott, Dare Me

“That’s what people never understand: They see us hard little pretty things, brightly lacquered and sequin-studded, and they laugh, they mock, they arouse themselves. They miss everything. You see, these glitters and sparkle dusts and magicks? It’s war paint, it’s feather and claws, it’s blood sacrifice.”
― Megan Abbott, Dare Me

“If it hadn't been what it was, it would've been beautiful.”
― Megan Abbott, Dare Me

“Where’d that world go, that world when you’re a kid, and now I can’t remember noticing anything, not the smell of the leaves or the sharp curl of dried maple on your ankles, walking? I live in cars now, and my own bedroom, the windows sealed shut, my mouth to my phone, hand slick around its neon jelly case, face closed to the world, heart closed to everything.”
― Megan Abbott, Dare Me

“I was so mad when I was younger," she said. "And then you grow up and think you're not that girl anymore. The girl you were at fifteen, sixteen. Angry and nasty. Hungry for love—"
"—I guess some girls are like that," Katie said, cooly.
"But the thing is, you're always that girl," Hailey said, stepping out of the car. "She never goes away. She's inside you all the time. That girl is forever.”
― Megan Abbott, You Will Know Me

“We wanted more. We knocked the butt ends of our forks against the table, tapped our spoons against our empty bowls; we were hungry. We wanted more volume, more riots. We turned up the knob on the TV until our ears ached with the shouts of angry men. We wanted more music on the radio; we wanted beats; we wanted rock. We wanted muscles on our skinny arms. We had bird bones, hollow and light, and we wanted more density, more weight. We were six snatching hands, six stomping feet; we were brothers, boys, three little kings locked in a feud for more.”
― Justin Torres, We the Animals

“Always more, always hungrily scratching for more. But there were times, quiet moments, when our mother was sleeping, when she hadn’t slept in two days, and any noise, any stair creak, any shut door, any stifled laugh, any voice at all, might wake her, those still, crystal mornings, when we wanted to protect her, this confused goose of a woman, this stumbler, this gusher, with her backaches and headaches and her tired, tired ways, this uprooted Brooklyn creature, this tough talker, always with tears when she told us she loved us, her mixed-up love, her needy love, her warmth, those mornings when sunlight found the cracks in our blinds and laid itself down in crisp strips on our carpet, those quiet mornings when we’d fix ourselves oatmeal and sprawl onto our stomachs with crayons and paper, with glass marbles that we were careful not to rattle, when our mother was sleeping, when the air did not smell like sweat or breath or mold, when the air was still and light, those mornings when silence was our secret game and our gift and our sole accomplishment—we wanted less: less weight, less work, less noise, less father, less muscles and skin and hair. We wanted nothing, just this, just this.”
― Justin Torres, We the Animals

“The only way out of the labyrinth of suffering is to forgive.”
― John Green, Looking for Alaska

“We are liars. We are beautiful and privileged. We are cracked and broken.”
― E. Lockhart, We Were Liars

“And in that moment, I swear we were infinite.”
― Stephen Chbosky, The Perks of Being a Wallflower

“There's nothing like deep breaths after laughing that hard. Nothing in the world like a sore stomach for the right reasons.”
― Stephen Chbosky, The Perks of Being a Wallflower

“I miss you more than I remember you.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“In Vietnamese, the word for missing someone and remembering them is the same: nhớ. Sometimes, when you ask me over the phone, Có nhớ mẹ không? I flinch, thinking you meant, Do you remember me?

I miss you more than I remember you.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“When does a war end? When can I say your name and have it mean only your name and not what you left behind?”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“They say the earth spins and that’s why we fall but everyone knows it’s the music.”
― Ocean Vuong, Time Is a Mother

“Everyone can forget us—as long as you remember.”
― Ocean Vuong, Night Sky with Exit Wounds

“Young enough to believe nothing.”
― Ocean Vuong, Night Sky with Exit Wounds

“Sorry about the blood in your mouth. I wish it was mine.

I couldn't get the boy to kill me, but I wore his jacket for the longest time.”
― Richard Siken, Crush

“Someone has to leave first. This is a very old story. There is no other version of this story.”
― Richard Siken, War of the Foxes

“When you have nothing to say, set something on fire. A blurry landscape is useless.”
― Richard Siken, War of the Foxes

“I had no proof that I had the stuff to be an artist, though I hungered to be one.”
― Patti Smith, Just Kids

“I immersed myself in books and rock 'n' roll, the adolescent salvation ...”
― Patti Smith, Just Kids

“That’s why all those records from high school sound so good. It’s not that the songs were better—it’s that we were listening to them with our friends, drunk for the first time on liqueurs, touching sweaty palms, staring for hours at a poster on the wall, not grossed out by carpet or dirt or crumpled, oily bedsheets. These songs and albums were the best ones because of how huge adolescence felt then, and how nostalgia recasts it now.”
― Carrie Brownstein, Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl: A Memoir

“The particulars of new places grabbed me and held me, the sweep of new coasts, cold, lovely, dawns. The world was incomprehensibly large, and there was still so much to see. Yes, I got sick sometimes of being an expatriate, always ignorant, on the outside of things, but I didn't feel ready for domestic life, for seeing the same people, the same places, thinking more or less the same thoughts, each day. I liked surrendering to the onrush, the uncertainty, the serendipity of the road.”
― William Finnegan, Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life

“By thirteen, I'd mostly stopped believing in God, but that was a new development and it left a hole in my world, a feeling that I'd been abandoned. The ocean was like an uncaring god, endlessly dangerous, power beyond measure.”
― William Finnegan, Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life

“I felt the weight of unmapped worlds, unborn language.”
― William Finnegan, Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life

“Oh, By-the-Sea, island of Fernwehs and everything I had ever known and loved. How I would miss you—every part of you—but especially the smell, always the smell: of salt, of brine, of water, of spells, of potions, of feathers, and of what it would mean to leave it all in just two months.”
― Katrina Leno, Summer of Salt

“She was born for oceanside bonfires, long gauzy dresses and uncombed hair, the scent of salt like a blanket you can’t peel off your skin. She was born for the smell of water, for the way it sank into your bones, stained your skin, dyed your blood a deep, salty blue.”
― Katrina Leno, Summer of Salt

“The island was back to its usual self, heavy with the thick heat of another summer's end, a mugginess that could be picked up in your palms and saved for a later day.”
― Katrina Leno, Summer of Salt

“It seemed funny to me that the sunset she saw from her patio and the one I saw from the back steps was the same one. Maybe the two different worlds we lived in weren't so different. We saw the same sunset.”
― S.E. Hinton, The Outsiders