Eden > Eden's Quotes

“What is that phrase the kids use today? Oh, yeah. You’re his bitch, his spirit-world bitch”
― Stacey Kade, The Ghost and the Goth

“Teachers, parents, guidance counselors... all of them are always pushing this crap about how it's okay to be different, just be yourself. Don't give in to peer pressure, blah, blah, blah. The truth is, it's really only okay to be yourself if that self is within an accepted range of "normal." You like soccer instead of basketball, Johnny? Well, okay, I guess, so long as you still like sports. What's that, Susie, you want to wear the blue sweater instead of the red? You know we're all about expressing individuality here... so long as it's still a sweater.”
― Stacey Kade, The Ghost and the Goth

“Really, being a librarian is a much more dangerous job than you realize.”
― Libba Bray, Beauty Queens

“Sometimes I just want to go in a room and break things and scream. Like, it’s so much pressure all the time and if you get upset or angry, people say, ‘Are you on the rag of something?’ And it’s like I want to say, ‘No. I’m just pissed off right now. Can’t I just be pissed off? How come that’s not okay for me?’ Like my dad will say, ‘I can’t talk to you when you’re hysterical.’ And I’m totally not being hysterical! I’m just mad. And he’s the one losing it. But then I feel embarrassed anyway. So I slap on that smile and pretend everything’s okay even though it’s not.”
― Libba Bray, Beauty Queens

“I’ve been thinking about that book about the boys who crash on an island,” Mary Lou said to Adina one afternoon as they rested on their elbows taking bites from the same papaya.

“Lord of the Flies. What about it?”

You know how you said it wasn’t a true measure of humanity because there were no girls and you wondered how it would be different if there had been girls?”

“Yeah?”

“Maybe girls need an island to find themselves. Maybe they need a place where no one’s watching them so they can be who they really are.”

There was something about the island that made the girls forget who they had been. All those rules and shalt nots. They were no longer waiting for some arbitrary grade. They were no longer performing. Waiting. Hoping.

They were becoming.

They were.”
― Libba Bray, Beauty Queens

“You want to know what pain is? Try running out of Advil when you've got a Category Five period. I've had cramps that would make grown men beg for a bullet between the eyes."
- Jennifer, "Beauty Queens”
― Libba Bray, Beauty Queens

“‎Just because you're funny doesn't mean you get to be cruel.”
― Libba Bray, Beauty Queens

“Weren't you wearing a purity ring when we got here? Aren't you supposed to be saving yourself?" Shanti asked.

"Yeah," Mary Lou answered. "And then I thought, for what? You save leftovers. My sex is not a leftover, and it is not a Christmas present.”
― Libba Bray, Beauty Queens

“I don’t care. If I like somebody, I like her, and that’s that.” He thumped his chest and made a scowly face. “Let ‘em come for me. I will stare down the mob with their pitchforks! I will make a speech about tolerance and love. I will tell them the folly of their ways! And then I will grab your hand and run like hell because, Jesus, a mob with pitchforks?”
― Libba Bray, Beauty Queens

“Men have feelings too, you know. You bruise the petals of my manflower.”
― Libba Bray, Beauty Queens

“As one, they leap, laughing, and that is where we leave them - mouths open, arms spread wide, fingers splayed to take in the whole world, bodies flying high in defiance of gravity, as if they will never fall.”
― Libba Bray, Beauty Queens

“God doesn't like lesbians," Grandma Huberman hised, throwing the magazine in the trash.
Jennifer knew what lesbian meant, and she knew she probably was one. But she couldn't understand why God would hold that against her or against Monica Mathers, who'd never started a war or killed anybody, and whose deadeye three-pointers were straight-up amazing. After all, hadn't God made both of them? But people were like that, she'd noticed. They'd invoke Godly privilege at the weirdest of times and for the most stupid reasons.”
― Libba Bray, Beauty Queens

“I'd say..." Petra crossed her legs, tucked a wayward strand of hair behind her ear. "I'd say, I am too fucking fabulous for one gender. Oh, and can we please get rid of the cheesy dance numbers? It's like torture step-ball-change."

"I'd say I am not a race. I am an individual," Nicole said.

Sosie moved her fingers gracefully, but no one understood. She waited for a moment. "I would say, learn to hear me in my own voice. I'm hearing impaired, not invisible.”
― Libba Bray, Beauty Queens

“When you looked up to the sky and cried 'Why?' sometimes the sky shrugged, yet other times it answered with warm assurance of linked hands.”
― Libba Bray, Beauty Queens

“Agent Jones held Sinjin’s face in his hands. “I’m going to make balloon animals. People need balloon animals.”
“How right you are, strange delusional man,” Sinjin said.”
― Libba Bray, Beauty Queens

“What about you and me, Adina?” Duff said, sidling up to her by the railing. “I know I screwed up. But do you think we could start over?”

Adina thought about everything that had happened. Part of her wanted to kiss Duff McAvoy, the tortured British trust-fund-runaway-turned-pirate-of-necessity who loved rock ‘n’ roll and mouthy-but-vulnerable bass-playing girls from New Hampshire. But he didn’t exist. Not really. He was a creature of TV and her imagination, a guy she’d invented as much as he’d invented himself. And this was what she suddenly understood about her mother: how with each man, each husband, she was really trying to fill in the sketchy parts of herself and become somebody she could finally love. It was hard to live in the messiness and easier to believe in the dream. And in that moment, Adina knew she was not her mother after all. She would make mistakes, but they wouldn’t be the same mistakes. Starting now.

“Sorry,” she said, heading for the bow, where a spot of sun looked inviting. ”Oh, also, about that blog? Just so you know, my dads know a lot of gay lawyers. Bitches will take your ass down if you try to publish that. Peace out.”
― Libba Bray, Beauty Queens

“...I took Advanced PowerPoint last semester. You guys are always misunderestimating me. I'm totally ready to handle the big stuff.”
― Libba Bray, Beauty Queens

“Wanna rock you, girl, with a butterfly tunic. / No, I'm not gay, I'm just your emo enuch. / Gonna smile real shy, won't cop a feel, / 'cause I'm your virgin crush, your supersafe deal. / Let those other guys keep sexing. / You and me, we be texting / 'bout unicorns and rainbows and our perfect love. / Girl, we fit together like a hand in a glove. / Now I don't mean that nasty, tell your mum don't get mad. / I even wrote 'You're awesome' on your maxi pads.”
― Libba Bray, Beauty Queens

“This is true happiness: to have no ambition and to work like a horse as if you had every ambition. To live far from men, not to need them and yet to love them. To have the stars above, the land to your left and the sea to your right and to realize of a sudden that in your heart, life has accomplished its final miracle: it has become a fairy tale.”
― Nikos Kazantzakis, Zorba the Greek

“Star Trek was an attempt to say that humanity will reach maturity and wisdom on the day that it begins not just to tolerate, but take a special delight in differences in ideas and differences in life forms. […] If we cannot learn to actually enjoy those small differences, to take a positive delight in those small differences between our own kind, here on this planet, then we do not deserve to go out into space and meet the diversity that is almost certainly out there.”
― Gene Roddenberry

“A little Learning is a dangerous Thing.”
― Alexander Pope