Girl in the Blue Coat Quotes

“My heart will still ache sometimes. Maybe more often than not. I think it's possible to be healed without feeling whole.”
― Monica Hesse, Girl in the Blue Coat

“Maybe we can't barter our feelings away, trading good deeds for bad ones and expecting to become whole.”
― Monica Hesse, Girl in the Blue Coat

“But when it comes down to it, we all die alone.”
― Monica Hesse, Girl in the Blue Coat

“When things come to an end in a way you didn't expect, in a way you never could have imagined, do they really come to an end? Does it mean you should keep searching, for better answers, for ones that don't keep you up at night? Or does it mean it's time to make peace?”
― Monica Hesse, Girl in the Blue Coat

“Sometimes hope can be poisonous.”
― Monica Hesse, Girl in the Blue Coat

“I would care that someone understood we were flawed and scarred and doing the best we could in this war. We were wrapped up in things that were so much bigger than ourselves. We didn't know. We didn't mean to. It wasn't our fault.”
― Monica Hesse, Girl in the Blue Coat

“Girls in love will do desperate and creative things.”
― Monica Hesse, Girl in the Blue Coat

“Isn't love the opposite of rational?”
― Monica Hesse, Girl in the Blue Coat

“Here is the thing about my grief: It’s like a very messy room in a house where the electricity has gone out.”
― Monica Hesse, Girl in the Blue Coat

“Tow best friends meeting on the street to say so many things at once: I betrayed you, I love you, I want to save you, I'm sorry. All around Europe, people are dying by the hundreds of thousands. And here, in my city, the Nazis slaughtered a family because of events that started with love and jealousy and a slip of the tongue.”
― Monica Hesse, Girl in the Blue Coat

“Lucky has become such a relative term, when the standards to meet it involve only not being treated like a criminal in your own home city.”
― Monica Hesse, Girl in the Blue Coat

“let go of a friend I’ll still miss every day. I’ll go back to work. I’ll get better. I’ll get better slowly. I’ll find all the secret, hidden things.”
― Monica Hesse, Girl in the Blue Coat

“I found a girl who wasn't the girl I was looking for. I let go of a friend I'll still miss every day. I'll go back to work. I'll get better. I'll get better slowly. I'll find all the secret, hidden things.”
― Monica Hesse, Girl in the Blue Coat

“And you don't have to cry about that boy. Boys are silly. The first thing you need is a best friend.”
― Monica Hesse, Girl in the Blue Coat

“We need girls who are pretty so the soldiers don’t notice that they’re also smart and brave and working against them”
― Monica Hesse, Girl in the Blue Coat

“Maybe we can’t barter our feelings away, trading good deeds for bad ones and expecting to become whole.”
― Monica Hesse, Girl in the Blue Coat

“But I suppose love doesn't stop, even in wars. There's only so much time a day that you can spend being terrified of something before your instinct to feel natural human emotions would kick in.”
― Monica Hesse, Girl in the Blue Coat

“Fear. That’s right. That was the odor I couldn’t place before. That’s the smell of my beautiful, breaking country.”
― Monica Hesse, Girl in the Blue Coat

“We were wrapped up in things that were so much bigger than ourselves. We didn’t know. We didn’t mean it. It wasn’t our fault.”
― Monica Hesse, Girl in the Blue Coat

“I like the idea of that small rebellion, carrying a paper piece of the resistance in my shoes.”
― Monica Hesse, Girl in the Blue Coat

“...and then we walked to get ice cream, in a relationship at its beautiful beginning, in a world that was closer to the end than we ever knew.”
― Monica Hesse, Girl in the Blue Coat

“in a relationship at its beautiful beginning, in a world that was closer to the end than we ever knew.”
― Monica Hesse, Girl in the Blue Coat

“They’re having a march, another one, a chance for rows of them to peacock through the streets in their helmets and black boots.”
― Monica Hesse, Girl in the Blue Coat

“Hoe heet je?” he asks. He wants to know my name, and he’s asked it in the informal, casual way, how a confident boy would ask a bucktoothed girl her name at a party, and this is good news because I’d much rather he be interested in me than the packages in my basket.”
― Monica Hesse, Girl in the Blue Coat

“And you don't have to cry about that boy. Boys are silly. The first thing you need is a best friend. (p. 166)”
― Monica Hesse, Girl in the Blue Coat

“Some green police don't speak it at all, and they're annoyed when we're not fluent in German, as if we should have been preparing our entire lives for the day when they invaded our country.”
― Monica Hesse, Girl in the Blue Coat

“Here is the thing about my grief: It’s like a very messy room in a house where the electricity has gone out. My grief over Bas is the darkness. It’s the thing that’s most immediately wrong in the house. It’s the thing that you notice straight off. It covers everything else up. But if you could turn the lights back on, you would see there are lots of other things still wrong in the room. The dishes are dirty. There is mold in the sink. The rug is askew.”
― Monica Hesse, Girl in the Blue Coat

“Isn’t love the opposite of rational?”
― Monica Hesse, Girl in the Blue Coat

“And you don't have to cry about that boy. Boys are silly. The first thing you need is a best friend.”
― Monica Hesse, Girl in the Blue Coat

“A long time before Bas died, we had a pretend argument about whose fault it was that he'd fallen in love with me.

It's your fault, he told me. Because you're lovable.”
― Monica Hesse, Girl in the Blue Coat