The Lost Quotes

“Someone else’s personal fantasy may well be your personal nightmare.”
― Cole McCade, The Lost

“For everyone who’s ever wanted to tear it all down… …and leave it all behind.”
― Cole McCade, The Lost

“Life is just a series of new beginnings, my dear. Sometimes to move on, we have to be willing to let go.”
― Cole McCade, The Lost

“Do you want to die, Gabriel?” “No.” His hand fell to cover hers, heated and rough. “I just want that moment when the choice to live or die isn’t my responsibility. Not my life, or anyone else’s.” Pale eyes fixed on her. “More than anything, I want a reason to keep living.”
― Cole McCade, The Lost

“Maybe we are lost, and some of us just don’t want to be found.”
― Cole McCade, The Lost

“It’s all right not to know what you want, little mouse. Some of the most interesting lives are led while trying to figure out just that.”
― Cole McCade, The Lost

“He needed a story to go with her wildness, her coldness, her hollowness. The real story was that she’d had everything and hadn’t deserved it, when she’d still wanted something else to sate a broken twisting emptiness that couldn’t be filled.”
― Cole McCade, The Lost

“She was a lioness, fierce in her roar.”
― Cole McCade, The Lost

“But she looked for the emotions and they weren’t there; just scraps and tatters, clinging to the empty place where they belonged. She had no feeling left, hollowed out and lost and wondering how she’d ended up”
― Cole McCade, The Lost

“Not knowing someone is no reason not to help.”
― Cole McCade, The Lost

“Have you ever felt like a train desperate to jump the tracks? I guess that’s me. I wanted to be a train wreck.”
― Cole McCade, The Lost

“all the secrets of being a woman, all the secrets of living a double life: one outside herself, one within.”
― Cole McCade, The Lost

“Do you know how it feels to be fire wrapped in a woman’s skin, but always feel like you’re drowning?”
― Cole McCade, The Lost

“I wanted to be the hero of my own story. Not the damsel. Heroically lost, heroically found.”
― Cole McCade, The Lost

“We find beauty in poison, and we love the bitter taste.”
― Cole McCade, The Lost

“Sometimes it feels like everything in my head is fleeting and impermanent. I change from one minute to the next. I’m a different person every other day. And maybe that person doesn’t think the same things as the person she was two days ago, but there are some things she still doesn’t want to forget.”
― Cole McCade, The Lost

“let Jacob explain it away as a domestic altercation, just those histrionic women being dramatic, more wink-wink nudge-nudge, you know how the little women are.”
― Cole McCade, The Lost

“Asked herself, too, why she even cared. She didn’t love him. She never had. She shouldn’t care what he did, save that it was so fucking unfair that he got to do everything he wanted while keeping a stranglehold on her leash.”
― Cole McCade, The Lost

“All because he knew how to use her in just the right way to make her feel loved.”
― Cole McCade, The Lost

“Happiness is impossible,” he murmured. “We’ve just been conditioned to seek it. Pop culture and television promise it’s out there, some ideal if we just play our cards right. But it’s not real. It’s not true. Happiness isn’t something we’re genetically programmed for. We’re programmed to want—and the more we want, the farther we go.”
― Cole McCade, The Lost

“Maybe I’m addicted to dissatisfaction and no matter how good I have it, I’ll never be happy.”
― Cole McCade, The Lost

“Nothing. Just that expectant, waiting silence where she knew he was looking at her. If she looked up, she’d see herself reflected in his eyes. What would she see, if she dared? A goddess…or a filthy little piece of gutter trash?”
― Cole McCade, The Lost

“They would always be here, she realized. Always. Day in, day out. They had lives of their own, lives that would be the same day after day into perpetuity, and yet they’d chosen to make themselves into what was essentially the furniture of other people’s realities. These, she thought, were people without dreams, and she wondered what had happened to cut those dreams out and leave them hollow carriers of nothing but a feeble need to see something more in the mindless kick of a ball down the field. She’d once thought it was imaginary value, the way they watched this. But it wasn’t imaginary. It was real, when it was the only thing that let them feel like there was still some bright spark left in them. That had value, if only to them. That meant something.”
― Cole McCade, The Lost

“Complexities only happen when we are indecisive, dear child.”
― Cole McCade, The Lost

“Letting go of the ring felt like letting go of that. Of that little girl’s daydream, one that had turned less into a nightmare and more into one long and dreamless night.”
― Cole McCade, The Lost

“I don’t like when stories end.” “Why?” “Because it means that nothing that comes after seems to matter.”
― Cole McCade, The Lost

“That moment was when she realized that every woman is a broken goddess. Every last one.”
― Cole McCade, The Lost

“Every day she would spread her wings and tell herself today was the day she would fly—but every day a quiet, hateful old witch told her if she tried even once, she would fall. Told her little girls weren’t meant to fly. Little girls were meant to stay at home and be pretty, and as long as she did that all the good things in the world would come to her.” The words tasted foul. “And the little girl, who used to be fearless, learned fear. Just a little more each day, until her wings grew too heavy to lift her and her fear weighed her down to earth.”
― Cole McCade, The Lost

“You skitter and flinch and run away.” His lips twitched. “This small thing living on the fringes, never wanting to be seen.”
― Cole McCade, The Lost

“So she closed her eyes and swung high, with the wind pushing her hair back and the scent of the day in her lungs. Her feet kicked toward the sun, and she imagined her anger was a fire that could scour everything clean, leaving nothing behind but a single solitary truck buried in the sand. She’d swung like this as a little girl. Back when she’d still thought she could fly. She’d fought gravity and thrown her little body against the chains until the swing arced so high the chains started to go slack, and she got that little excited twist of fear in the pit of her stomach when it felt like nothing was holding her up. She’d always thought she would rip loose from the seat, and wings would sprout from her back and carry her away. She’d laughed until she was dizzy, then screamed happily as the earth dragged her back down in a plunging descent—and she’d always waited for just that perfect moment to thrust her legs out and saw them against the air so she could fight coming to ground for just a few seconds longer. Just a few seconds while her nanny shouted that she’d hurt herself. Seconds when the giggles of the other children sounded like wind-chime music, and she’d felt like she’d had the sky in her veins.”
― Cole McCade, The Lost