The Opposite of Everyone Quotes

“The wold was full of us, the leftovers and the leavers, the bereaved and the broken.”
― Joshilyn Jackson, The Opposite of Everyone

“I had spent my whole life hungry for forgiveness. It had not come, so I didn’t know firsthand what he was feeling. But I had imagined it, over and over. I’d wanted it so bad. I’d wanted Kai—or anyone, anyone who knew the worst in me—to say that I was still dear, and good, and worthy.”
― Joshilyn Jackson, The Opposite of Everyone

“I want to thank you, first, Person Who Bought This Book. Because of you, I have a job I love. Because of you, the people in my head get to live outside of it. When I meet you, you talk about my characters as if they are old friends (or enemies) we have in common; I cannot explain how miraculous this feels. If you are one of those people who have put my books into the hands of other readers—either professionally as a god-called lunatic who loves books so much you hand-sell them or as a reader who picked one for book club or gave it to your best friend for a birthday—well. This book exists because of you. I hope you are happy about this. I am—happy and grateful and a little bit in love with you.”
― Joshilyn Jackson, The Opposite of Everyone

“She spoke with all the authority vested in her by her flea-market prayer beads and her lotus-flower tramp stamp.”
― Joshilyn Jackson, The Opposite of Everyone

“Odd to think of myself that way, small and blind and tethered to her. In that time before memory, everything I touched was hers. I heard her voice from the inside, with no idea that she was a separate person. Back then, she had simply been the world.”
― Joshilyn Jackson, The Opposite of Everyone

“He threw up his hands and said, "And you know I fucking love you. So?"
I looked into his right eye, then his left, back and forth.
"Why do you love me?"
I knew what I wanted, but on his side, I didn't want it to be because I could be so bad for him. I didn't want to be a pretty fist that he could bang himself into. I leaned against the wall, my head right by the keypad. "If we're going to take a run at this, it has to be more than good sex and your masochism."
I wasn't sure he was going to answer. I wasn't sure he had a reason, and he could be so hard to read. But then he smiled.
"Because everyone on this shithole planet says a lot of pretty words to make themselves look good while they do awful things", he said. "You're the opposite."
It was a good answer. A good thing to say. I peered from one eye to the other, back and forth, harder than I had looked into Clark's eyes or the gun's. Birdwine's left one was rimmed in black and violet, still swollen. I watched his pupils expand as I leaned up. There was a fair amount of crazy present, sure, but in the darkness of his eyes I saw myself reflected clearly. I was real to him. He saw me all the way down to the bottom and knew every awful thing I'd done. More - he knew all that I was capable of doing, and yet, he looked at me like I was something worthy and good.
"Come upstairs," I said. There was a promise in the words that spoke to more than sex. I thought it was implicit. But he only waited, silent. He didn't even blink, until my own eyes felt dry and itchy on his behalf. Finally I added, "Yes. Okay. Yes. I fucking love you."
"Oh yeah," he said, and punched the entry code in for my door.”
― Joshilyn Jackson, The Opposite of Everyone

“Her expression is blank and demure, but this girl and I, we have the same shape mouth. I recognize the way she’s set it, like she’s got a ball of mutiny in there, and she is rolling it around to get a thorough taste. She’s not half as placid as she looks.”
― Joshilyn Jackson, The Opposite of Everyone

“...nothing helps a lie float like a hopeful listener.”
― Joshilyn Jackson, The Opposite of Everyone

“I could feel the ghosts of all the girls I'd been behind me in the alleyway, creeping in my wake. I could almost hear my own footsteps as an echo. For a moment it was so real that I spooked myself. I stopped and turned to look. There was only silence and darkness. I walked on.”
― Joshilyn Jackson, The Opposite of Everyone

“I could break things in a thousand ways--anything from surgical dismantling as meticulous as a bomb squad work to wrecking ball style mass destruction. If I broke a thing, it stayed broke. If I broke one of my things, I lived with the pieces, or replaced it.”
― Joshilyn Jackson, The Opposite of Everyone

“Now, I don’t think about it.” Or when I did, I mostly felt a terrible relief. Truly terrible, like a person who’s been told they no longer have to carry the weight of their own gangrenous and rotting left arm. It smells, it hurts, it’s literally killing you—but it’s still the only left arm that you’ll ever have.”
― Joshilyn Jackson, The Opposite of Everyone

“Tonight, I wanted to be a little more like him. I didn’t mean to blind myself to how hard and hateful the world was; sweetness was hard to find and harder still to keep. I only meant to reach for it, anyway.”
― Joshilyn Jackson, The Opposite of Everyone

“Maybe that’s what true love looked like, at its best. It looked like this to Julian, an adopted kid who talked to me of teams and rescues.”
― Joshilyn Jackson, The Opposite of Everyone

“I held my ground, because prey retreats, and hunger follows anything that runs.”
― Joshilyn Jackson, The Opposite of Everyone

“No one here talks like me or gets my references or knows the songs I know. I don’t look like any of them. Even my bond with Joya was based on not belonging here.”
― Joshilyn Jackson, The Opposite of Everyone

“Hana didn’t know that I existed, much less that I was looking for her. She didn’t know that anyone was looking. Hana wasn’t like me. She was like Candace, Shar, Karice—every lost girl in the world who felt herself unvalued and unsought. She had no way to know that somewhere in the world, right now, her name was being called.”
― Joshilyn Jackson, The Opposite of Everyone

“I had a strict No Assholes policy, and I’d never met a cheater of either sex who wasn’t some stripe of asshole underneath the He doesn’t understand mes and the We drifted aparts and the She won’t do that thing I need in beds”
― Joshilyn Jackson, The Opposite of Everyone

“I’d grown up with a woman who could make a heap of stolen parts sound truer than the truth. She could shade a story I’d heard a thousand times until all at once the meaning inverted and it became its own opposite. I was her kid. I operated inside the ethics of my profession, but I could spin like nobody’s business.”
― Joshilyn Jackson, The Opposite of Everyone

“Then he did the thing I couldn’t manage. The kid leaned in and hugged me. A real hug, committed. I stiffened up—I couldn’t help it—but he was clearly a dog person, so I didn’t pull away.”
― Joshilyn Jackson, The Opposite of Everyone

“In fight or flight Kai has always chose for us, and my mother is made out of wings. I don't think I am like her, not in this way.”
― Joshilyn Jackson, The Opposite of Everyone

“She’s stepped right in and owned me, and yet, it does not feel like surrender. There is choice inside surrender. This is something much more basic.”
― Joshilyn Jackson, The Opposite of Everyone

“She never told me to be any different, the jagged scrape of a thousand guilt and fury slivers rasping on my bones became background music, an ever-present hum.”
― Joshilyn Jackson, The Opposite of Everyone

“We were so careful with each other. We had to be. We touched softly in deference to all the ways that we were wounded, working around each other’s bruises and ruined places.”
― Joshilyn Jackson, The Opposite of Everyone

“...the way we ended things was not uncommon for kids like us. She said we'd lost enough in our short lives to want to cauterize our wounds before they happened. We burned our connection closed before we felt the holes.”
― Joshilyn Jackson, The Opposite of Everyone

“What had he been Thinking? If a fella was looking for love, I was the wrong road to go down. I was the road, in fact, that was crawling with barbed wire and bears and dynamite, marked with huge signs that said THERE IS NOTHING FOR YOU HERE.”
― Joshilyn Jackson, The Opposite of Everyone