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The Words Between Us Quotes
The Words Between Us
by
Erin Bartels5,921 ratings, 3.98 average rating, 913 reviews
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The Words Between Us Quotes
Showing 1-18 of 18
“The end of a friendship—a true and soul-stirring friendship—is a terrible thing.”
― The Words between Us
― The Words between Us
“Each time, when I hear what comes out of my mouth—so inadequate, so small compared to what I had experienced while reading—I feel like I’ve snatched the story from the author’s hands and trampled it underfoot.”
― The Words between Us
― The Words between Us
“My life isn’t someone else’s fault. It’s just life.”
― The Words Between Us
― The Words Between Us
“I didn’t know where to start. I got a job where I could travel. I think somewhere in the back of my mind I thought maybe I’d run into you somewhere or at least come across some sort of sign you’d been somewhere—something so that I could at least be sure you existed, that you weren’t some figment of my imagination. But everywhere I went, I could tell right away you weren’t there.”
― The Words Between Us
― The Words Between Us
“And there was fear in the writing. Fear that they would be misinterpreted, yes, but greater than that was the fear that they’d never be interpreted at all. That no one would read them and find me there.”
― The Words Between Us
― The Words Between Us
“A part of her is stuck in some moment in the past,”
― The Words between Us
― The Words between Us
“Life finds us, no matter how we try to push it away… innocence ends for all of us, in different ways and at different times. But it must end. And no one is really to blame. Because if it were not that person, that event, it would be another.”
― The Words Between Us
― The Words Between Us
“I know why some books live on forever while others struggle for breath, forgotten on shelves and in basements. the authors . . . hadn’t bled. They hadn’t cut themselves open and given up a part of themselves that they would dearly miss. They hadn’t lost anything in the writing. That’s the difference between the books that I could never aptly explain to Dawt Pi and the ones I let The Professor shred. That’s the difference between the dead and the living.”
― The Words Between Us
― The Words Between Us
“There are many types of quiet. The quiet when you first open a book and prepare yourself to enter a story. The quiet of the seed underground, waiting for spring. The quiet that follows the moment the past rips through time to invade the present.”
― The Words Between Us
― The Words Between Us
“Sad and mad and love are such weak words, drawn long ago from Germanic languages spoken by people who may have been more stone than flesh. The soul needs words rooted in romance languages, words like despondent and ravished and adore.”
― The Words Between Us
― The Words Between Us
“A moment of peace, a moment without doubt, a moment I felt that, were I called to, I could walk on water, I could hold back the wind.”
― The Words Between Us
― The Words Between Us
“Were all bad people once beautiful children?”
― The Words Between Us
― The Words Between Us
“You can’t tame the waves and you can’t hold back the wind. You’ve got to move with it. But that’s not to say you have to let it take you wherever it will. Think of a sailboat. The wind moves it, but it’s not what steers it. The captain of the ship decides where it will go. You’re the captain of your ship.”
― The Words between Us
― The Words between Us
“got up from the couch, went to my room, and slammed the door. Out my window the snow was falling, falling, falling. I opened up my book again and picked up where I’d left off. It was easy—I just opened to where my finger was, found the last line I’d read, and read the next sentence. If only someone had just put their finger in my life where it got interrupted so I could find the last line I’d said—Good night, Mom! Good night, Dad!—and keep going from there. Instead, someone had ripped the book in half and burned the end of it, and I was left hanging off the page, holding on for dear life, trying to figure out what came next.”
― The Words between Us
― The Words between Us
“Peter smiles. 'You can't fight the elements. Wind and water always win. Even against stone. It's why we have the Grand Canyon and the Arches in Utah and Niagara Falls. You can't tame the waves and you can't hold back the wind. You've got to move with it. But that's not to say you have to let it take you wherever it will. Think of a sailboat. The wind moves it, but it's not what steers it. The captain of the ship decides where it will go. You're the captain of your ship.”
― The Words Between Us
― The Words Between Us
“The cold put everything else on pause—the trees, the rivers, the flowers—so you could deal with the bones of life. It changed everything to blacks and whites, throwing the world into clear relief, separating the good from the bad, the true from the false, the beautiful from the ugly. Winter made the rest of life’s ambiguities somehow bearable for a while.”
― The Words between Us
― The Words between Us
“God loves you, Robin. I pray for you—every day.' I can’t answer her without releasing the tears that are swiftly building up behind my eyes like a river behind a dam. I wish I was so sure that God looked at me with anything but fathomless disappointment.”
― The Words Between Us
― The Words Between Us
“In the absence of real society, I made my own out of the imagined people Peter Flynt slid into my locker. They entered like corpses on a slab, but they came to life in my mind with each turn of the page.”
― The Words Between Us
― The Words Between Us
