Lucia Franco > Lucia's Quotes

“We live for books.”
― Umberto Eco

“Think God’s got bigger concerns in his house than me droppin’ the f-bomb, sweetcheeks.”
― Kristen Ashley, Golden Trail

“I consider my work optimistic in that the people, during the period I’m writing about them, are experiencing intense emotion. It is my belief that this is all there is to it.”
― Don Carpenter

“The future is now. It's time to grow up and be strong. Tomorrow may well be too late.”
― Neil LaBute, Reasons to Be Pretty

“I've got the guts to die. What I want to know is, have you got the guts to live?”
― Tennessee Williams, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

“We loved each other with a premature love, marked by a fierceness that so often destroys adult lives.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

“You should date a girl who reads.
Date a girl who reads. Date a girl who spends her money on books instead of clothes, who has problems with closet space because she has too many books. Date a girl who has a list of books she wants to read, who has had a library card since she was twelve.

Find a girl who reads. You’ll know that she does because she will always have an unread book in her bag. She’s the one lovingly looking over the shelves in the bookstore, the one who quietly cries out when she has found the book she wants. You see that weird chick sniffing the pages of an old book in a secondhand book shop? That’s the reader. They can never resist smelling the pages, especially when they are yellow and worn.

She’s the girl reading while waiting in that coffee shop down the street. If you take a peek at her mug, the non-dairy creamer is floating on top because she’s kind of engrossed already. Lost in a world of the author’s making. Sit down. She might give you a glare, as most girls who read do not like to be interrupted. Ask her if she likes the book.

Buy her another cup of coffee.

Let her know what you really think of Murakami. See if she got through the first chapter of Fellowship. Understand that if she says she understood James Joyce’s Ulysses she’s just saying that to sound intelligent. Ask her if she loves Alice or she would like to be Alice.

It’s easy to date a girl who reads. Give her books for her birthday, for Christmas, for anniversaries. Give her the gift of words, in poetry and in song. Give her Neruda, Pound, Sexton, Cummings. Let her know that you understand that words are love. Understand that she knows the difference between books and reality but by god, she’s going to try to make her life a little like her favorite book. It will never be your fault if she does.

She has to give it a shot somehow.

Lie to her. If she understands syntax, she will understand your need to lie. Behind words are other things: motivation, value, nuance, dialogue. It will not be the end of the world.

Fail her. Because a girl who reads knows that failure always leads up to the climax. Because girls who read understand that all things must come to end, but that you can always write a sequel. That you can begin again and again and still be the hero. That life is meant to have a villain or two.

Why be frightened of everything that you are not? Girls who read understand that people, like characters, develop. Except in the Twilight series.

If you find a girl who reads, keep her close. When you find her up at 2 AM clutching a book to her chest and weeping, make her a cup of tea and hold her. You may lose her for a couple of hours but she will always come back to you. She’ll talk as if the characters in the book are real, because for a while, they always are.

You will propose on a hot air balloon. Or during a rock concert. Or very casually next time she’s sick. Over Skype.

You will smile so hard you will wonder why your heart hasn’t burst and bled out all over your chest yet. You will write the story of your lives, have kids with strange names and even stranger tastes. She will introduce your children to the Cat in the Hat and Aslan, maybe in the same day. You will walk the winters of your old age together and she will recite Keats under her breath while you shake the snow off your boots.

Date a girl who reads because you deserve it. You deserve a girl who can give you the most colorful life imaginable. If you can only give her monotony, and stale hours and half-baked proposals, then you’re better off alone. If you want the world and the worlds beyond it, date a girl who reads.

Or better yet, date a girl who writes.”
― Rosemarie Urquico

“Somewhere over the rainbow, skies are blue, and the dreams that you dare to dream really do come true.”
― E.Y. Harburg

“Angry, and half in love with her, and tremendously sorry, I turned away.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“If you have the words, there's always a chance that you'll find the way.”
― Seamus Heaney, Stepping Stones: Interviews with Seamus Heaney

“Find what you love and let it kill you.”
― Charles Bukowski

“Do you hate people?”

“I don't hate them...I just feel better when they're not around.”
― Charles Bukowski, Barfly

“To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.”
― Oscar Wilde

“It makes you wonder. All the brilliant things we might have done with our lives if only we suspected we knew how.”
― Ann Patchett, Bel Canto

“No thief, however skillful, can rob one of knowledge, and that is why knowledge is the best and safest treasure to acquire.”
― L. Frank Baum, The Lost Princess of Oz

“Remain true to yourself, child. If you know your own heart, you will always have one friend who does not lie.”
― Marion Zimmer Bradley, The Forest House

“If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all.”
― Oscar Wilde

“If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot.”
― Stephen King

“And I've fallen.

So hard.

I've hit the ground. Gone right through it. Never in my life have I felt this. Nothing like this. I've felt shame and cowardice, weakness and strength. I've known terror and indifference, self-hate and general disgust. I've seen things that cannot be unseen.

And yet I've known nothing like this terrible, horrible, paralyzing feeling. I feel crippled. Desperate and out of control. And it keeps getting worse. Every day I feel sick. Empty and somehow aching.

Love is a heartless bastard.”
― Tahereh Mafi, Destroy Me

“I spent my life folded between the pages of books.
In the absence of human relationships I formed bonds with paper characters. I lived love and loss through stories threaded in history; I experienced adolescence by association. My world is one interwoven web of words, stringing limb to limb, bone to sinew, thoughts and images all together. I am a being comprised of letters, a character created by sentences, a figment of imagination formed through fiction.”
― Tahereh Mafi, Shatter Me

“Stay with me. What we have is good.”
― Lucia Franco, You'll Think of Me

“I fought hard for you in the beginning, but if I can't have all of you, then I don't want any of you. This is a two-way street...”
― Lucia Franco, You'll Think of Me

“There was no one else, Livy. No one else got what you got. Those were our moments, and ours alone.”
― Lucia Franco, You'll Think of Me

“Music and Livy were a powerful concoction. Always had been in memory, but in the flesh it was exceedingly stimulating. It was a high he craved often, and coincidentally he’d just had his first dose. Luke was only getting started as it slowly crept its way through, invigorating the blood in his veins and transforming his deep thoughts into music once again.”
― Lucia Franco, You'll Think of Me

“Fine. Leave. If that’s what you want, then go. I hope you find what you’re looking for, but know this – I won’t be waiting for you when you come back, ‘cause baby, you’ll be back. This place is in your bones. Mark my words.”
― Lucia Franco, You'll Think of Me

“Don't think,” he demanded. “Just feel. Just feel the music and let it run through you. Feel it up in here,” Luke drawled as he placed the back of his knuckles to the side of her face and began a tantalizing downward spiral. “And let it flow slowly through you here,” he finished grazing over her heart.

His voice was a steady deep hum of intense desire as he ran the back of his hand down her neck and over her chest, then around the curve of her breast exceedingly slow. His thumb swept out and grazed the fullness of her breast, lingering while he stared into her eyes and then moved down to her waist. Olivia’s body alighted with hunger as she struggled not to tremble from his touch. It wasn’t right, yet she couldn’t control her body’s reaction. She shouldn’t be craving his touch, yet she burned for it badly.

“Let it take you away and live in the moment with me,” he tugged her closer to him, tightening his arms around her.”
― Lucia Franco, You'll Think of Me

“God, you make me hot when you talk grammar.”
― Lex Martin, Dearest Clementine

“In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: it goes on.”
― Robert Frost

“Break my heart. Break it a thousand times if you like. It was only ever yours to break anyway.”
― Kiera Cass, The One

“Trust yourself. You know more than you think you do.”
― Benjamin Spock