Burn Before Reading Quotes

“The view was, to say the least, incredible. And the feeling of it all - of being so small and insignificant - was a lot like the feeling I got when Burn and I would stand on the cliff in the mornings and watch the sun kiss the world awake.
I felt...unimportant. I felt light, and airy, and free. I felt like nothing mattered - not my grades, not my college future, not my awful spying on the Blackthorns - nothing. I'd done nothing wrong up here. I had no responsibilities up here - not to Dad, not to Mom, not even to myself. For a few minutes, I felt untouchable.
Nothing could get me in the sky, not even my problems. I watched the sun as I fell. So what, I thought, if Mom and Dad divorced? Would it really be the end of the world? This was the world - this huge thing below me, reduced to nothing more than toy-like dioramas of forests and towns. There were a hundred million problems waiting for me when I landed, but when you got high enough, all those problems seemed so small and insignificant. The sun didn't care about divorce. The sky didn't care about grades. No one cared, except me and the people in the below-world. I wasn’t a scholarshipper up here; I wasn’t a teacher’s pet, a wannabe psychologist, a girl who left her friends behind, or an attempted good-daughter. I
was just…me.”
― Sara Wolf, Burn Before Reading

“For what it’s worth, my dear, life is very long, and memories are very short.”
― Sara Wolf, Burn Before Reading

“Of course I do. I’ve seen you upstairs every day, checking out book after book. You stay here reading long after every other student has gone home. If there’s one thing I know, it’s that someone who loves reading as much as you do can never be stopped. No matter where you go, you’ll have whole worlds in your head. No matter how hard life gets, you’ll have whole people’s lives worth of experience tucked away inside you. No matter how hard the world tries to silence you, there are millions and millions of words just waiting to burst from you.”
― Sara Wolf, Burn Before Reading

“Whatever you did can be undone,” He says. “It may take months. It may take years. But as long as there is breath in your body, there is a chance to make up for what you’ve done. It will be slow, and difficult. But some would say it’s worth it. If you care about the people you hurt, you cannot run away. That would only cause you more pain. You must be kind to yourself.”
― Sara Wolf, Burn Before Reading

“You shut up. At least I try to get over my fears, instead of wallowing in them.”
“Wolf’s trying, Fitz,” I spoke up. “In his own way. Everybody tries in different ways, at different paces, okay?”
― Sara Wolf, Burn Before Reading

“You don't know what it's like. You don't know what it's like to wait around for someone to kill themselves. You have no idea what it's like to hear someone you care about say they'll do it, knowing there's nothing you can do to stop them. You wait, and the fear infects you like a maggot, eats you from the inside.
Every waking moment you're apart from them, you imagine all the different ways they could be dying. Dead. And all you can do is stand there and say 'I'm here for you. But what if that’s not enough? What if your best isn't enough to save them? Then what? What if you try desperately, every day, to give them a reason to stay alive, even if it means you cut off parts of yourself like a sacrificial offering?”
― Sara Wolf, Burn Before Reading