The Reading Frog > The Reading Frog's Quotes

“Have you ever wanted to be something else so … so someone would still want you?”
― C G Drews

“It’s shitty that it has to be luck to be loved as you are,”
― C G Drews

“After all, friendship lasted forever until it didn’t.”
― C G Drews

“Being left aching and hollow was a familiar feeling. A comfortable pain.
Andrew had always been an empty boy.”
― C G Drews

“they usually smoothed things over by pretending it never happened. Andrew couldn’t live like that; if one thing went wrong, it festered in his chest until he couldn’t bear it”
― C G Drews

“Bad things were happening to Thomas, not Andrew. He was the one who needed protecting right now. Andrew couldn’t help noticing that not one adult had asked Thomas if he was all right.”
― C G Drews

“If they stood any closer together, they could fit into each other’s skin.”
― C G Drews

“Andrew hated the way his brain did this. Destroyed beautiful things. It was like he couldn’t just hold a flower; he had to crush the petals in his fist until his hand was stained with murdered color.”
― C G Drews

“A horribly delicious feeling flooded Andrew’s chest. He could taste pain in the air and for once it wasn’t his, and he loved that.”
― C G Drews

“I’m scared of everything except the dark.”
Thomas huffed the tiniest laugh. “I knew that. You write the darkest things, and it never keeps you up.”
“Tell me yours.”
“I think someday you’ll hate me.” Thomas’s voice stretched with a loneliness Andrew had never heard before. “You’ll cut me open and find a garden of rot where my heart should be.” - “When I cut you open,” Andrew finally said, “all I’ll find is that we match.”
― C G Drews

“It was strange, Andrew thought, how when something moved in the dark, everyone’s first instinct was to go inside and hide under the covers.
As if monsters couldn’t open doors and crawl into bed with you.”
― C G Drews

“Anyone could be a monster. In the right circumstances. Motivated by the right thing. To protect someone else or to … to protect yourself. Is it that wrong to fight for yourself if no one else will?”
― C G Drews

“For a vicious moment, Andrew thought about slipping his fingers into Thomas’s cut. Taking hold of his rib and breaking it. Pulling the soft crumbling bone from his chest and sewing it into his own. They’d be forever together, rib against rib, fused in gore and bone and adoration.”
― C G Drews

“There was something so raw about being known this intimately, being understood down to his darkest parts. Andrew’s heart felt swollen to twice its normal size.”
― C G Drews

“Andrew could feel Thomas’s fear, the exhaustion—but also his loss.
First his art, now the woods. They used to belong to Thomas. This was the place where he roared and grew taller, where his smile could make flowers bloom and his energy could flow endless and untamed.
Monsters had eaten that out of him. The trick would be to stop them before there was nothing left of Thomas to save.”
― C G Drews

“If the trees belonged to Thomas, midnight was in love with Andrew. It made him braver somehow, invisible, hiding his delicate edges and leaving behind a lean and hungry shadow. In the dark, no one could see his hollow and empty places. Instead he looked like he could have teeth.”
― C G Drews

“strike ‘normal’ out of this conversation—it’s the most obtuse word and I hate it.”
― C G Drews

“He used to kiss trees. Now they made him flinch.”
― C G Drews

“Kisses, but not.
Apologies, but useless.”
― C G Drews

“all Andrew could think was if he could crack open Thomas’s ribs right then and fit his whole self inside him, he would.”
― C G Drews

“He was a wisp of cloud barely gripping a comet.”
― C G Drews

“What would it even look like, to cut their feelings out, bloody and aching and raw, and compare them? To find they didn’t match. To be left with guts vivisected and no way to sew themselves back up so they looked the same as before.”
― C G Drews

“He could tear out a dozen stories and shove them in Thomas’s face. Each said, in bloody and beautiful ways, I love you I love you I love you.”
― C G Drews

“There’s a forest growing in my stomach, so I’m never hungry.”
― C G Drews

“Can you even hear yourself? You screw up and you want to be punished. You want to be absolved in violence. Do you realize how incredibly fucked up that is?”
― C G Drews

“if anyone peeled apart his ribs, they’d see the darkness knit into his flesh.”
― C G Drews

“If you cut open my chest'—Andrew's voice was wrecked—'you'll find a garden of rot where my heart should be.”
― C.G. Drews, Don't Let the Forest In

“You could cut me open and devour everything that I am. I would let you, I'd ask you to. But I have no idea what it means to you. What I mean to you.”
― C.G. Drews, Don't Let the Forest In

“An extraordinary amount of intimacy lay in exchanging art. Not for critique and not for class. Just to look. To feel. To understand each other.”
― C.G. Drews, Don't Let the Forest In

“It was strange, Andrew thought, how when something moved in the dark, everyone's first instinct was to go inside and hide under the covers.
As if monsters couldn't open doors and crawl into bed with you.”
― C.G. Drews, Don't Let the Forest In