Everything You Want Me to Be Quotes

“Every book changes you in some way, whether it’s your perspective on the world or how you define yourself in relation to the world.”
― Mindy Mejia, Everything You Want Me to Be

“MOST PEOPLE think acting is make-believe. Like it’s a big game where people put on costumes and feign kisses or stab wounds and then pretend to gasp and die. They think it’s a show. They don’t understand that acting is becoming someone else, changing your thoughts and needs until you don’t remember your own anymore. You let the other person invade everything you are and then you turn yourself inside out, spilling their identity onto the stage like a kind of bloodletting.”
― Mindy Mejia, Everything You Want Me to Be

“Evil is simple. It's a child's explanation for why people do bad things. The truth is always more complicated and worth pursuing.”
― Mindy Mejia, Everything You Want Me to Be

“You can’t live your life acting for other people. Other people will just use you up. You have to know yourself and figure out what you want. I can’t do that for you. Nobody can.”
― Mindy Mejia, Everything You Want Me to Be

“He said anything worth doing should scare you a little, and that some of the greatest stories began with a journey.”
― Mindy Mejia, Everything You Want Me to Be

“Ordinary men commit extraordinary evil all the time. Trust me.”
― Mindy Mejia, Everything You Want Me to Be

“silence ends an argument quicker than words.”
― Mindy Mejia, Everything You Want Me to Be

“You say you're just acting, but you're fracturing yourself into a thousand pieces, and every time I see another piece, you're gone again.”
― Mindy Mejia, Everything You Want Me to Be

“Ordinary men commit extraordinary evil all the time.”
― Mindy Mejia, Everything You Want Me to Be

“They could be gone for years, healed over and laid to rest, and then out of nowhere the gun smoke stung my eyes, the wet jungle invaded my nose, and I had to bury them all over again. You could leave a war, but it never left you.”
― Mindy Mejia, Everything You Want Me to Be

“Every book changes you in some way, whether it's your perspective on the world or how you define yourself in relation to the world.”
― Mindy Mejia, Everything You Want Me to Be

“Mom warned me that I had a lot to learn about the world. I wished she would've mentioned how much the learning was going to hurt.”
― Mindy Mejia, Everything You Want Me to Be

“She had killed me, in so many ways, over months of guilt and obsession and need. She had taken everything I thought I was and destroyed it with a coy wink in the middle of a chaotic classroom.”
― Mindy Mejia, Everything You Want Me to Be

“Her description of the trees echoed through the air between us, plain poetry that could have graced the pages of any number of pastoral novels, and I realized how beautiful she was, and how insignificant I'd become to her.”
― Mindy Mejia, Everything You Want Me to Be

“It was amazing how life simply kept moving forward. You could do the most despicable, amoral thing you'd ever imagined and just drive home afterwards.”
― Mindy Mejia, Everything You Want Me to Be

“Books were finite, a world contained between two covers that could be repeated as many times as I turned the first page.”
― Mindy Mejia, Everything You Want Me to Be

“Every book changes you in some way. whether it's your perspective on the world or how you define yourself in relation to the world. Literature gives us identity, even terrible literature.”
― Mindy Mejia, Everything You Want Me to Be

“Maybe part of you wished they'd see past the act, even once, and tell you Bridget Jones-style that they like you just for who you were, but that never happened.”
― Mindy Mejia, Everything You Want Me to Be

“women walking down city sidewalks with little rat dogs”
― Mindy Mejia, Everything You Want Me to Be

“Get off the stage, sweetheart, she said. You can’t live your life acting for other people. Other people will just use you up. You have to know yourself and figure out what you want. I can’t do that for you. Nobody can.”
― Mindy Mejia, Everything You Want Me to Be

“I lost my virginity when I was fifteen, although lost is a funny word for it. I didn’t misplace it like a homework assignment or a cell phone. It wasn’t like I could find it again and tuck it back in there.”
― Mindy Mejia, Everything You Want Me to Be

“I’d been to more funerals than I cared to count, and eaten so many ham and butter sandwiches I could practically taste the flour-dusted bun when a hearse drove down Main Street,”
― Mindy Mejia, Everything You Want Me to Be

“For better or for worse.” Better or worse what? I’d agreed to adjectives. I’d happily squeezed Mary’s hands and made vows with unknown placeholders for nouns. For someone who aspired to be an English professor, binding my life to someone else’s with a game of Mad Libs suddenly seemed like a terrible joke.”
― Mindy Mejia, Everything You Want Me to Be

“You say you're just acting, but you're fracturing yourself into a thousand pieces, and every time I see another piece, you're gone again. You turn into someone else, a crowd of someone elses, and it makes me wonder if there's any such thing as Hattie Hoffman".”
― Mindy Mejia, Everything You Want Me to Be

“People used words to try to change what they should be changing with their own two hands. And if the problem was too big to fix, no words called up into the air would make a lick of difference.”
― Mindy Mejia, Everything You Want Me to Be

“Curses. Jesus. It took all kinds. There wasn't anything to a curse but words. Just like blessings and prayers and all the rest of it. People used words to try to change what they should be changing with their own two hands. And if the problem was too big to fix, no words called up into the air would make a lick of difference.”
― Mindy Mejia, Everything You Want Me to Be