The Paper Swan Quotes

“You don’t always get the treasure by holding on. Sometimes the magic happens when you let go.”
― Leylah Attar, The Paper Swan

“Because when we love, we carry it on the inside, and we can turn on its light even in our darkest moments. The deeper we love, the brighter it shines.”
― Leylah Attar, The Paper Swan

“It’s not over, you know. It never has been,” he said. “Whether you say yes or no, you will always be my forever.”
― Leylah Attar, The Paper Swan

“We are sand and rock and water and sky, anchors on ships and sails in the wind. We are a journey to a destination that shifts every time we dream or fall or keep or weep. We are stars with flaws that still sparkle and shine. We always strive, always want, always have more questions than answers, but there are moments like these, full of magic and contentment, when souls get a glimpse of the divine and quite simply, lose their breath.”
― Leylah Attar, The Paper Swan

“You can either choose love or you can choose hate, because where one lives, the other will die.”
― Leylah Attar, The Paper Swan

“I want to remember this,” he said, pulling me into his arms. “If I die tonight, I want to die remembering what it was like to hold the whole world in my hands.”
― Leylah Attar, The Paper Swan

“In the grand scheme of things, we do the best we can, all of us, and we make up our stories as we go along; we write them and direct them and project them into the world. And sometimes we get other people’s stories, and sometimes we don’t, but always there is a story behind a story behind a story, linked in a chain that we can only see a small part of, because it’s there when we’re born and it continues after we’re gone. And who can comprehend all of it in one lifetime?”
― Leylah Attar, The Paper Swan

“Sometimes everything gets dismantled so something better can be pieced together.”
― Leylah Attar, The Paper Swan

“there is no space too dark or too vast or too irredeemable that can’t be filled with love.”
― Leylah Attar, The Paper Swan

“Just sitting here thinking how far you’ve come, and I’m overwhelmed with how much I love you.”
― Leylah Attar, The Paper Swan

“How deluded we become when we start believing that everything in the world is about us. How hard we work to make things fit into our made-up theories. How blindly we follow our worked-up emotions, the good, the bad and the ugly.”
― Leylah Attar, The Paper Swan

“Hope is a hollow backbone. It can’t always carry the weight of reality.”
― Leylah Attar, The Paper Swan

“The truth doesn’t always set you free. The truth can kill you, slice open your innards and turn everything inside out. Everything I believed, everything I thought was real had been turned upside down.”
― Leylah Attar, The Paper Swan

“I wanted to stay with him so I could put together all the dented, shattered parts of him, because I could never be whole where he was broken.”
― Leylah Attar, The Paper Swan

“And it all starts within, because within is where all things begin.”
― Leylah Attar, The Paper Swan

“Don’t play with scorpions unless you intend to get stung.”
― Leylah Attar, The Paper Swan

“Terror is a bigger bitch than Panic. Terror swallows you whole.”
― Leylah Attar, The Paper Swan

“Because Damian in love was a thing of beauty—intoxicating, addictive, demanding, attentive, and always, always hungry.”
― Leylah Attar, The Paper Swan

“but there are moments like these, full of magic and contentment, when souls get a glimpse of the divine and quite simply, lose their breath.”
― Leylah Attar, The Paper Swan

“He lay on the floor, taking stock of the rest of his body. Legs? Yup, still there. Arms? Present. And functional. Torso? All systems go. Junk? Come in, junk? Alive, captain. Not happy, but alive.”
― Leylah Attar, The Paper Swan

“We are sand that hasn’t been washed away yet,”
― Leylah Attar, The Paper Swan

“You kept tearing down my defences until I couldn’t fight you anymore. I’m in love with you, Skye. Bare, stripped down, completely vulnerable, in love.”
― Leylah Attar, The Paper Swan

“Murder, rape, torture, abuse. Are we ever able to truly understand the ‘why’ or do we simply yearn for labels and boxes to organize the chaos we can’t control?”
― Leylah Attar, The Paper Swan

“It’s all fucked up, Rafael. There are no good guys or bad guys. Everyone has a reason.”
― Leylah Attar, The Paper Swan

“We are a question that hasn’t been answered yet, a hiding place that hasn’t been found yet, a battle that hasn’t been fought yet.”
― Leylah Attar, The Paper Swan

“I needed his frost and his bite and his unrelenting fury to power us through the storm.”
― Leylah Attar, The Paper Swan

“Hope is a hollow backbone. It can’t always carry the weight of reality. And I was tired of propping it up. I was tired of mending it each time it snapped. You can only cheat death so many times; you can only fight so long, so hard.”
― Leylah Attar, The Paper Swan

“But people’s eyes should never be so different that you no longer recognized their souls; they should never turn so hard that they shut all the doors to the past.”
― Leylah Attar, The Paper Swan

“But it’s not always enough, you know? And sometimes, it spills over because you can’t control it, because you need to make others feel your pain, your hurt, your rage, because it’s tough to walk around all scarred up, in a world full of slick billboards and bright, smiley toothpaste ads and shiny, happy people. Life’s not always fair. So suck it, lick it, stroke it, fuck it.”
― Leylah Attar, The Paper Swan

“You think there’s such a thing as too much happiness?” he asked. “Because right now, I feel like I can’t contain it and the universe is going to step in to restore the balance.”
― Leylah Attar, The Paper Swan