Wild Beauty Quotes

“Even in its first faint traces, love could alter a landscape. It wrote unimagined stories and made the most beautiful, forbidding places.”
― Anna-Marie McLemore, Wild Beauty

“This is was what their mothers would say if she and her cousins ever told them the things they folded inside their hearts. Twice as many paths to trouble, their mothers would whisper. As though their daughters loving both men and women meant they wanted all of them in the world. There was no way to tell their mothers the truth and make them believe it, that hearts that loved both boys and girls were no more reckless or easily won than any other heart. They loved who they loved. They broke how they broke. And the way it happened depended less on what was under their lovers' clothes and more on what was wrapped inside their spirits.”
― Anna-Marie McLemore, Wild Beauty

“Everyone is broken. The only difference is how.”
― Anna-Marie McLemore, Wild Beauty

“Of course he would think the whole glittering universe existed to spin anything he wanted out of stardust. He was a man, and a rich one, and these together made him believe the planets and moons orbited around the single point of his desires.”
― Anna-Marie McLemore, Wild Beauty

“As though their daughters loving men and women meant they wanted all of them in the world. There was no way to tell their mothers the truth and make them believe it, that hearts that loved boys and girls were no more reckless or easily won than any other heart. They loved who they loved. They broke how they broke.”
― Anna-Marie McLemore, Wild Beauty

“He’s not stupid,” she said. “He just speak a language none of you bothered to learn.”
― Anna-Marie McLemore, Wild Beauty

“[...] that hearts that loved boys and girls were no more reckless or easily won than any other heart. They loved who they loved. They broke how they broke. And the way it happened depended less on what was under their lovers’ clothes and more on what was wrapped inside their spirits. What secret halls and trapdoors their souls held, and what each one hid and guarded.”
― Anna-Marie McLemore, Wild Beauty

“You took the truth and you made it into flowers”
― Anna-Marie McLemore, Wild Beauty

“There was no way to tell their mothers the truth and make them believe it, that hearts that loved boys and girls were no more reckless or easily won than any other heart. They loved who they loved. They broke how they broke. And the way it happened depended less on what was under their lovers’ clothes and more on what was wrapped inside their spirits. What secret halls and trapdoors their sounds held, and what each one hid and guarded.”
― Anna-Marie McLemore, Wild Beauty

“This was what turned Nomeolvides girls into women. Not their first times bleeding between their legs, but the first time their hearts broke. Estrella could feel hers inside her rib cage, a bird trapped in an attic.”
― Anna-Marie McLemore, Wild Beauty

“Estrella wished she could pry the ground open like the shell of a pomegranate, spilling out its secrets like shining red seeds.”
― Anna-Marie McLemore, Wild Beauty

“We made it our home,” Estrella said. “So now we live here.”
― Anna-Marie McLemore, Wild Beauty

“Even in its first faint traces, love could alter a landscape. It wrote unimagined stories and made the most beautiful, forbidding places.
Love grew such strange things.”
― Anna-Marie McLemore, Wild Beauty

“Twice as many paths to trouble, their mothers would whisper. As though their daughters loving men and women meant they wanted all of them in the world.”
― Anna-Marie McLemore, Wild Beauty

“Their mothers did not notice the other moments that made color bloom in their daughters’ cheeks. How Azalea flirted with girls in ruffled dresses. How the thing that first made Estrella fall a little in love with boys or girls was so often their hands, whether they were showing at the edge of a shirt cuff or a lace sleeve. How Gloria blushed when she caught the eye of women in sleek gowns, women who wore their hair in low, smooth chignons and who preferred gray or black or navy. And how she shared her laughter, her true, fluttering laugh, with boys who could more easily be called pretty than handsome.”
― Anna-Marie McLemore, Wild Beauty

“Nothing else in the world makes a man like that more afraid than five girls on their periods.”
― Anna-Marie McLemore, Wild Beauty

“There was magic to things that were familiar and ordinary. The way they were known was a kind of enchantment, and when they were gone, the spell broke.”
― Anna-Marie McLemore, Wild Beauty

“Twice as many paths to trouble,' their mothers would whisper. As though their daughters loving men and women meant they wanted all of them in the world. There was no way to tell their mothers the truth and make them believe it, that hearts that loved boys and girls were no more reckless or easily won than any other heart. They loved who they loved. They broke how they broke.”
― Anna-Marie McLemore, Wild Beauty

“Because falling in love with a girl who feared nothing in this world had left her ready to love a boy whose heart had been broken before she ever touched him.”
― Anna-Marie McLemore, Wild Beauty

“He was a man, and a rich one, and these together made him believe the planets and moons orbited around the single point of his desires.”
― Anna-Marie McLemore, Wild Beauty

“There was no way to tell their mothers the truth and make them believe it, that hearts that loved boys and girls were no more reckless or easily won than any other heart.”
― Anna-Marie McLemore, Wild Beauty

“Everything that had cursed them had made a home of this ground. It had grown tendrils and shoots. It had twisted and curled, and shot out thorns. They had to dig their hands in as deep as the earth would let them. They could not free themselves by deadheading flowers and crushing leaves.

They would change nothing by picking flowers.

They had to rip out their fate by the roots.
”
― Anna-Marie McLemore, Wild Beauty

“Everyone's broken. The only difference is how.”
― Anna-Marie McLemore, Wild Beauty

“No," he said. He said it without sadness, because however he had died to the gray world and the soft, olive-leafed world before that, he was in this world now. Estrella's.
This was the place he was coming back to life.”
― Anna-Marie McLemore, Wild Beauty

“Today i solved a problem my mother knew nothing about," Estrella said. Her words twisted, each one sounding harder, like a knot tightening. "She still doesn't. I fixed it, and she had no idea. My mother, all our mothers, they think they're holding everything up, but we have it too. It's ours too. So forget what my nother thinks i should or shouldn't be doing because we're going and getting some damn cotton candy, okay?”
― Anna-Marie McLemore, Wild Beauty

“Sorrow was a family heirloom, written into their blood like ink on a will.”
― Anna-Marie McLemore, Wild Beauty

“Everyone’s broken. The only difference is how.”
― Anna-Marie McLemore, Wild Beauty

“Don’t think for one second you can hide anything from this place. No one ever has.”
― Anna-Marie McLemore, Wild Beauty

“Never underestimate what the ground under your feet knows, what it can do. What it can give you and what it can steal.”
― Anna-Marie McLemore, Wild Beauty

“Her heart was poison. It was a close tangle of thorns. Even when it held love, that love came sharp, and she didn't know how to offer it to anyone except with the edges out.”
― Anna-Marie McLemore, Wild Beauty