The Hazel Wood Quotes

“She talked like a woman who knew more books than people.”
― Melissa Albert, The Hazel Wood

“I remembered less from my own life than I did from the books I read.”
― Melissa Albert, The Hazel Wood

“Everyone is supposed to be a combination of nature and nurture, their true selves shaped by years of friends and fights and parents and dreams and things you did too young and things you overheard that you shouldn’t have and secrets you kept or couldn’t and regrets and victories and quiet prides, all the packed-together detritus that becomes what you call your life.”
― Melissa Albert, The Hazel Wood

“Life was a big thing to live without a map.”
― Melissa Albert, The Hazel Wood

“Hell is caring about other people.”
― Melissa Albert, The Hazel Wood

“Look until the leaves turn red, sew the worlds up with thread. If your journey's left undone, fear the rising of the sun.”
― Melissa Albert, The Hazel Wood

“Life never turns out how you imagine it will when you’re young. Everything is smaller than you think, or too big. It all smells a little funny and fits like somebody else’s shirt.”
― Melissa Albert, The Hazel Wood

“And while they're being told, stories create the energy that makes this world go. They keep our stars in place. They make our grass grow.”
― Melissa Albert, The Hazel Wood

“if you’re not with the book you want, you might as well want the book you’re with.”
― Melissa Albert, The Hazel Wood

“You’re a story, but that doesn’t make you any less true.”
― Melissa Albert, The Hazel Wood

“When in doubt, the answer is always Death. With a capital D.”
― Melissa Albert, The Hazel Wood

“We were each our own island, gathered together into one messed-up archipelago.”
― Melissa Albert, The Hazel Wood

“There are no lessons in it. There's just this harsh, horrible world touched with beautiful magic, where shity things happen. And they don't happen for a reason, or in threes, or in a way that looks like justice. They're set in a place that has no rules and doesn't want any. And the author's voice - - your grandmother's voice - - is perfectly pitiless. She's like a war reporter who doesn't give a fuck.”
― Melissa Albert, The Hazel Wood

“I wanted my mom, in a way you maybe can’t ever want anyone else. It was primal and sharp and it made me feel like a needle in the haystack of a cold and terrible world. I wanted my mom.”
― Melissa Albert, The Hazel Wood

“Some bitch? She was my girlfriend for eight months. It's so ugly when girls call each other that word."

"Oh, my god, Finch, go get a liberal arts degree.”
― Melissa Albert, The Hazel Wood

“I walked a block on rubbery knees, feeling the way I did the time a van clipped my bike and sent me reeling into a line of parked cars. Ella had dropped her cigarette and jumped on the fallen bike, screaming at the top of her lungs as she sped after the car. Bleeding in three places, I watched her go, glad she knew I'd rather have retribution than comfort.”
― Melissa Albert, The Hazel Wood

“The quickest way to end this is to begin it, and that's no way to start, is it?”
― Melissa Albert, The Hazel Wood

“It's hard, isn't it, to find you're not at all the thing you thought you were?”
― Melissa Albert, The Hazel Wood

“You might think it’s strange, but you get used to those karmic moments in the book business. Books want to be read, and by the right people. There’s nothing surprising in it, not to me.”
― Melissa Albert, The Hazel Wood

“My love he wooed me
My love he slew me
My love he buried my bones
His love he married
His love I buried
My love now wanders alone ”
― Melissa Albert, The Hazel Wood

“Usually when I looked at people too long I started seeing them as component parts: Bony noses. Eyeballs in sockets. Odd cartilage curve of ears and fingers so strange and overevolved and makeup floating just over the skin and what the hell was with pants, and knees, and how did we walk around like all of this was normal?”
― Melissa Albert, The Hazel Wood

“Breathe in the light, Alice. Breathe out the anger.”
― Melissa Albert, The Hazel Wood

“I avoided my eyes while brushing my teeth, then climbed into bed with a copy of _The Blind Assassin_, because if you're not with the book you want, you might as well want the book you're with.
--Melissa Albert, _The Hazel Wood_”
― Melissa Albert, The Hazel Wood

“Every time we left a place, I felt the things that happened there being wiped clean, till all that was left was Ella, our fights and our talks and our winding roads. I wrote down dates and places in the corners of my books, and lost them along the way.”
― Melissa Albert, The Hazel Wood

“So my name, my full name, is Ellery Oliver Djan-Nelson-Abrams-Finch."

"Does that fit on a Scantron?"

"A what?"

"Nevermind.”
― Melissa Albert, The Hazel Wood

“My mother was raised on fairy tales, but I was raised on highways.”
― Melissa Albert, The Hazel Wood

“You might think you have a really good reason, but nothing could be worth this. Nothing could be worth feeling this way. I feel like a changeling wearing someone else's skin. I can't remember what I liked, or what I wanted, why I worked or left the house or did anything. It's all gone... I think whatever I used to be, it dropped through the binding. I wish the rest of me had gone with it.”
― Melissa Albert, The Hazel Wood

“I did it because a girl doing nothing in a fairy tale ends up dead or worse, but a girl who makes a decision usually gets rewarded.”
― Melissa Albert, The Hazel Wood

“We were checked in by a man who looked exactly how the guy checking you in at a cheap motel in the middle of the night is supposed to.”
― Melissa Albert, The Hazel Wood

“I’m a girl,” I said fiercely. “I’m a person.” “You’re both, and neither. You’re a story, but that doesn’t make you any less true.”
― Melissa Albert, The Hazel Wood