Emma Blue > Emma 's Quotes

“In each of us lie good and bad, light and dark, art and pain, choice and regret, cruelty and sacrifice. We’re each of us our own chiaroscuro, our own bit of illusion fighting to emerge into something solid, something real. We’ve got to forgive ourselves that. I must remember to forgive myself. Because there is a lot of grey to work with. No one can live in the light all the time.”
― Libba Bray

“And that is how change happens. One gesture. One person. One moment at a time.”
― Libba Bray, The Sweet Far Thing

“I have to tell you I love living in a world without clocks. The shackles are gone. I’m a puppy unleashed in a meadow of time. -- Stargirl”
― Jerry Spinelli, Love, Stargirl

“Don't think or judge, just listen.”
― Sarah Dessen, Just Listen

“People have a habit of inventing fictions they will believe wholeheartedly in order to ignore the truth they cannot accept.”
― Libba Bray, The Sweet Far Thing

“I am a jumble of passions, misgivings, and wants. It seems that I am always in a state of wishing and rarely in a state of contentment.”
― Libba Bray, The Sweet Far Thing

“You must remember, my dear lady, the most important rule of any successful illusion: First, the people must want to believe in it.”
― Libba Bray, The Sweet Far Thing

“I run after her, not really giving chase. I’m running because I can, because I must.
Because I want to see how far I can go before I have to stop.”
― Libba Bray, A Great and Terrible Beauty

“Corrupt my brother, will you? I'll see you in hell first, sir.”
― Libba Bray, The Sweet Far Thing

“That's what living in their world is-a big lie. An illusion where everyone looks the other way and pretends that nothing unpleasant exists at all, no goblins of the dark, no ghosts of the soul.”
― Libba Bray

“Shall I tell you a story? A new and terrible one? A ghost story? Are you ready? Shall I begin? Once upon a time there were four girls. One was pretty. One was clever. One charming, and one...one was mysterious. But they were all damaged, you see. Something not right about the lot of them. Bad blood. Big dreams. Oh, I left that part out. Sorry, that should have come before. They were all dreamers, these girls. One by one, night after night, the girls came together. And they sinned. Do you know what that sin was? No one? Pippa? Ann? Their sin was that they believed. Believed they could be different. Special. They believed they could change what they were--damaged, unloved. Cast-off things. They would be alive, adored, needed. Necessary. But it wasn't true. This is a ghost story remember? A tragedy. They were misled. Betrayed by their own stupid hopes. Things couldn't be different for them, because they weren't special after all. So life took them, led them, and they went along, you see? They faded before their own eyes, till they were nothing more than living ghosts, haunting each other with what could be. With what can't be. There, now. Isn't that the scariest story you've ever heard?”
― Libba Bray, A Great and Terrible Beauty

“The key holds the truth”
― Libba Bray, The Sweet Far Thing

“How can my ankles and arms be obscene?”
― Libba Bray, A Great and Terrible Beauty

“We sit and listen and are enthralled anew, for good stories, it seems, never lose their magic.”
― Libba Bray, The Sweet Far Thing

“There are no safe choices. Only other choices.”
― Libba Bray, A Great and Terrible Beauty

“Each night I lie down in a graveyard of memories. Moonlight spins a shroud about me. ”
― Jerry Spinelli, Love, Stargirl

“Live today. Not yesterday. Not tomorrow. Just today. Inhabit your moments. Don’t rent them out to tomorrow. Do you know what you’re doing when you spend a moment wondering how things are going to turn out with Perry?

You’re cheating yourself out of today. Today is calling to you, trying to get your attention, but you’re stuck on tomorrow, and today trickles away like water down a drain. You wake up the next morning and that today you wasted is gone forever. It’s now yesterday. Some of those moments may have had wonderful things in store for you , but now you’ll never know.”
― Jerry Spinelli, Love, Stargirl

“I grabbed her, right there outside the lunch room in the swarming mob. I didn't care if others were watching. In fact, i hoped they were. I grabbed her and squeezed her. I had never been so happy and so proud in my life.”
― Jerry Spinelli, Stargirl

“You can never really know someone completely. That’s why it’s the most terrifying thing in the world, really—taking someone on faith, hoping they’ll take you on faith too. It’s such a precarious balance, It’s a wonder we do it at all. And yet..”
― Libba Bray

“There is a time in every life when paths are chosen, character is forged. I could have chosen a different path. But I didn’t. I failed myself.”
― Libba Bray, The Sweet Far Thing

“I know because I read...Your mind is not a cage. It's a garden. And it requires cultivating.”
― Libba Bray

“No one asks how or what I am doing. They could not care less. We’re all looking glasses, we girls, existing only to reflect their images back to them as they’d like to be seen. Hollow vessels of girls to be rinsed of our own ambitions, wants, and opinions, just waiting to be filled with the cool, tepid water of gracious compliance.
A fissure forms in the vessel. I’m cracking open.”
― Libba Bray, A Great and Terrible Beauty

“It is funny how you do not miss affection until it is given, but once it is, it can never be enough; you would drown in it if possible.”
― Libba Bray, The Sweet Far Thing

“Around us the night creatures have their say. We are surrounded by a symphony of crickets and frogs. Neither of us feels the need to speak, and I suppose that is one of the qualities I find comforting in Kartik. We can be alone together.”
― Libba Bray, The Sweet Far Thing

“We all do things we desperately wish we could undo. Those regrets just become part of who we are, along with everything else. To spend time trying to change that, well, it's like chasing clouds.”
― Libba Bray

“The night's chilly breath tickles up my neck and finds my ear, whispering secrets only the wind knows.”
― Libba Bray, The Sweet Far Thing

“Felicity and I watch the dancers moving as one. They spin about like the earth on it's axis, enduring the dark, waiting for the sun.”
― Libba Bray, The Sweet Far Thing

“My cholera's acting up again.”
― Libba Bray, A Great and Terrible Beauty

“I had thought Felicity dangerous a moment ago, when she felt powerful. I was wrong. Wounded and powerless, she is more dangerous than I could imagine.”
― Libba Bray, A Great and Terrible Beauty

“When you don't talk, there's a lot of stuff that ends up not getting said.”
― Catherine Gilbert Murdock, Dairy Queen