If He Had Been With Me Quotes

“I want to pull Finny out of my mind like a splinter so that I can adore Jamie the way he deserves to be adored. And even more than that, because I am a selfish, bad creature, I want to feel that adoration. I want to be free of this guilt.”
― Laura Nowlin, If He Had Been with Me

“I wasn’t with Finny on that August night, but my imagination has burned the scene in my mind so that it feels like a memory.”
― Laura Nowlin, If He Had Been with Me

“God, Autumn, you’re the ideal I’ve judged every other girl by my whole life,”
― Laura Nowlin, If He Had Been with Me

“Try to marry your first love. For the rest of your life, no one will ever treat you as well.”
― Laura Nowlin, If He Had Been with Me

“If he had been with me, Finny would still be alive. If he had been with me, everything would have been different. But whose fault is it that he wasn't?”
― Laura Nowlin, If He Had Been With Me

“This book is a treasure; I did not suspect it would be so good when I picked it up, but now I can feel the printed words seeping through my skin and into my veins, rushing to my heart and marking it forever. I want to savor this wonder, this happening of loving a book and reading it for the first time, because the first time is always the best, and I will never read this book for the first time ever again.”
― Laura Nowlin, If He Had Been with Me

“My love for Finny is buried like a stillborn child; it is just as cherished and just as real, but nothing will ever come of it. I imagine it wrapped up in lace, tucked away in a quiet corner of my heart. It will stay there for the rest of my life, and when I die, it will die with me.”
― Laura Nowlin, If He Had Been with Me

“We're going to get ice cream," Finny says.
"I'm being kidnapped," I say.
"Good job, Phineas," my mom says.”
― Laura Nowlin, If He Had Been With Me

“There will always be something I cannot protect him from.”
― Laura Nowlin, If He Had Been With Me

“I never know what to do to make you happy, do I?"
"You make me happier than any other person ever has," I say but he still won't look at me.”
― Laura Nowlin, If He Had Been With Me

“And I love him. For all of my memory, I have loved him; I do not even notice it anymore. I feel what I have always felt when I look at him, and I have never before asked myself what it is exactly. I love him in a way I cannot define, as if my love were an organ within my body that I could not live without yet could not pick out of an anatomy book. I do not love him the way I love Jamie. It’s not the way I love Sasha or my mother or Mr. Laughegan. It’s the way I love Finny. And it’s impossible to say and even harder to feel. Nineteen When the weather turns cold, the War breaks out.”
― Laura Nowlin, If He Had Been with Me

“Are you sure you still would want to if you were sober?" I say.
Finny nods. "Yeah," he says again. "But I'm only telling you because I'm not.”
― Laura Nowlin, If He Had Been With Me

“I think we're supposed to experience as much beauty as we can.
Isn't that the same as happiness, too?
No, because sometimes sad things are beautiful.”
― Laura Nowlin, If He Had Been with Me

“and I know, I know, I know, I know. If he had been with me, everything would have been different.”
― Laura Nowlin, If He Had Been with Me

“Death happens to him more suddenly than I can describe to you or even care to imagine.”
― Laura Nowlin, If He Had Been with Me

“I’m in love with Finny.”
― Laura Nowlin, If He Had Been with Me

“We are lying out on the grass looking up at the stars like characters in a children’s book.”
― Laura Nowlin, If He Had Been with Me

“Sometimes I am disappointed with love.”
― Laura Nowlin, If He Had Been With Me

“I wake many times. We shift and change positions together; he nuzzles me, I move up against him. He holds my hands, my neck, my face. I dream, I wake, I see him, I sleep”
― Laura Nowlin, If He Had Been With Me

“I like the idea of making out in his car; like a scene from a movie, the windows fog up in the cold and the radio plays our song.”
― Laura Nowlin, If He Had Been With Me

“And the need to write it down overwhelms me and I step out of the shower, dripping and shivering.”
― Laura Nowlin, If He Had Been with Me

“There is real life and then there are books. I try to puzzle out what is real and what isn’t, what I can have and what I never will.”
― Laura Nowlin, If He Had Been with Me

“After this,” he says, “things are going to be the way they were always supposed to be.” Then he climbs inside and closes the door.”
― Laura Nowlin, If He Had Been with Me

“My mother named me Autumn. People say to me “Oh how pretty,” and then the name seems to glide away from them, not grasping all the things that the word should mean to them, shades of red, change, and death”
― Laura Nowlin, If He Had Been With Me

“You think it is okay for you to be sad every day. But it is not okay. And you do not deserve it.”
― Laura Nowlin, If He Had Been with Me

“They would rather ruin their perfect love trying to make it work because being unhappy together is better than being unhappy apart.”
― Laura Nowlin, If He Had Been With Me

“My breath shudders and my eyelids close against the pain of loving him.”
― Laura Nowlin, If He Had Been with Me

“I love him the most when we fight and I am scared that he will leave me.”
― Laura Nowlin, If He Had Been With Me

“On August 8, Phineas Smith died, and I can imagine every detail of that night.”
― Laura Nowlin, If He Had Been with Me

“I’ve loved him my whole life, and somewhere along the way, that love didn’t change but grew.”
― Laura Nowlin, If He Had Been with Me