Lightbreakers Quotes

“It was overwhelming in her body, the multitude, all the selves she'd been.”
― Aja Gabel, Lightbreakers

“This was the problem then. Whenever he spoke about New York, he never once spoke about “we.” She was so angry he ruined the burrito for her. She had been starving, and now she wanted nothing to do with it. She put the unfinished food down on the counter, where it would stay until morning. The fight that erupted then was the worst they’d ever had, having an effect like an earthquake, a strong jolt along a fault line, resulting in a permanent breakage. She screamed at him, and he hated to be screamed at. He iced her out. She felt abandoned. He didn’t know how to leave her. She didn’t want him to leave. As she cried, she remembered when they first met, how perfectly they’d fit together, their desires and their pasts and their imagined future. She thought this fight, his imminent departure, was making all that came before false. He’d been a coward. She’d been a coward. They’d both been afraid to look at what was really happening, their lives diverging, the logical end of a molten partnership.”
― Aja Gabel, Lightbreakers: A Novel

“Bria, older, a receptionist at a hair salon and a smoker.”
― Aja Gabel, Lightbreakers: A Novel

“Of course Noah had baggage. Everyone had locked away parts of themselves.”
― Aja Gabel, Lightbreakers: A Novel

“But Caroline knew her. She knew what Maya wanted even when Maya didn’t know how to express it. Their junior year they’d gone to Montreal for spring break and closed down a cheesy club that played French house music. Afterward, Maya had drunkenly dragged them toward the tiny convertible of the two beautiful Italian men they’d met on the dance floor, but Caroline seamlessly and believably made up the excuse that they actually had to go to the bathroom, and led Maya away from the strangers. From a terrace, they’d watched as the men drunkenly drove their car into a pole, crunching the hood and setting off the airbags. The men were okay, but Maya was shaken into sobriety.”
― Aja Gabel, Lightbreakers: A Novel

“Just because it doesn’t resemble the reality you know doesn’t mean it can’t be real,”
― Aja Gabel, Lightbreakers: A Novel

“No good life is free from unease, because unease is the start of exploration”
― Aja Gabel, Lightbreakers

“If a black hole consumes, a white hole ejects. Even stranger, if a black hole contains the future, a white hole is the expression of the future.”
― Aja Gabel, Lightbreakers

“There was something sad about leaving your sadness behind.”
― Aja Gabel, Lightbreakers

“Her death was not something they could affect. Her life was something they always would have.”
― Aja Gabel, Lightbreakers

“She guessed it all came down to hope, being able to have hope for the future when you were young, before the world let you down in all sorts of ways.”
― Aja Gabel, Lightbreakers

“She hadn't seen him in years, but everything that had ever passed between them - love and sex and rage and grief and anger and finally, horribly, indifference - was suddenly present, too. Surrounding them, ghosts. None of it ever goes away.”
― Aja Gabel, Lightbreakers