Breathless Quotes

“But all the scary stuff doesn't really compare to getting lost in your own mind.”
― Jennifer Niven, Breathless

“I'm right here. We're right here. I can't tell you what the point of this is except that I'm so fucking happy I met you, and I can't tell you what's going to happen... But I do know that right now, in this moment, on this island, I'm where I'm supposed to be, and that's with you.”
― jennifer niven, Breathless

“There’s this feeling you get when you write a really good, true sentence or paragraph or scene, and it makes you feel invincible, as if you can do anything. It feels like a superpower, and in that moment no one can touch you. You’re the best there is. That’s how you make me feel, Jeremiah Crew. Like I’m the best there is.”
― Jennifer Niven, Breathless

“There’s beauty in every story. And there’s a story in everything.”
― Jennifer Niven, Breathless

“(...) when life suddenly changes and you’re left picking up the pieces. She says it’s actually how you pick up the pieces that defines you.”
― Jennifer Niven, Breathless

“I am staring at the place where the floor used to be. All I can think is how one minute the floor was there and now it’s not. How you could go through an entire day, every day, not thinking about the floor or the ground
because you just assume it will always be there. Until it isn’t.”
― Jennifer Niven, Breathless

“Because after suffering a loss, you become a ghost in your own body. You observe yourself doing things and saying things that you might not normally do or say. You need something to ground you and prove to you that you’re still here. As a way of feeling something. Anything.”
― Jennifer Niven, Breathless

“Life is an accumulation of aches. They fill you up and take your breath away and you think you’ll never breathe again, but before you know it, you are just words on paper, gone quiet and asleep until someone finds those words and reads them.”
― Jennifer Niven, Breathless

“So what scares you most? With us?”
I give this a little thought. “That you’ll be really into me one day and the next day you won’t be, and I won’t see it coming. Because apparently feelings can change overnight. Maybe it’s me. Maybe I’m too much. Or maybe I’m not enough.”
― Jennifer Niven, Breathless

“Trapped behind the wall I’ve built around myself, unable to move or breathe or do anything but keep building it up around me, brick by brick, fast as I can.”
― Jennifer Niven, Breathless

“You have you let the tears come,” she always says. “Because if you don’t, they’ll come out eventually – maybe not as tears, but as anger or something else.”
― Jennifer Niven, Breathless

“Just like I will decide my life. No more waiting for other people to decide things for me. I'm writing it right now.”
― Jennifer Niven, Breathless

“Why do some love stories have a shelf life and others last forever?”
― Jennifer Niven, Breathless

“It’s funny how the bad things stay with you and the good things sometimes get lost.”
― Jennifer Niven, Breathless

“Now.
Close the book.
But first—remember to open yourself up to love and possibility, to almostness and maybe.
Use your voice.
Let others in.
Choose your future. Choose your body. Choose yourself.
And go out there and write your life.”
― Jennifer Niven, Breathless

“No one can bring me to tears faster than myself.”
― Jennifer Niven, Breathless

“I’ve never realised how hard we are on our bodies. I think, Why are we so mean to ourselves? Why aren’t we happy with what we have?”
― Jennifer Niven, Breathless

“You never know what someone’s hiding. We all hide ourselves when we need to.”
― Jennifer Niven, Breathless

“And I think: Love complicates everything. It makes you hurt and it makes you doubt and it makes you wish you didn’t love. It makes you want to be watchful so that nothing bad or surprising ever happens, it makes you never want to love anyone again because they’ll only hurt you too.”
― Jennifer Niven, Breathless

“Sometimes things end, even if you don’t want them to.”
― Jennifer Niven, Breathless

“What makes someone stop loving you?
One day there's love, the next day there's not. Where does it go?
Something that lived and breathed like that - how can it just vanish as if it never really existed?
I imagine a room or maybe an entire planet where the love goes to live once we're done with it. Like a kind of junkyard. Little remnants of love scattered everywhere. People picking through, collecting the strongest, biggest pieces, and trying to make something of them again. Isn't this what we do every time we meet someone new or start loving someone new? Pick up the old battered bits of ourselves and try again?”
― Jennifer Niven, Breathless

“This whole concept is so antiquated. As if all that matters is penis-plus-vagina sex. Something like twenty percent of Americans identify as something other than completely straight, so why are we still so focused on a woman's first time with a man? And why is a girl's virginity such a big deal anyway? People don't get excited about a straight guy having sex. It's all high fives and 'Now you're a man.' They don't sit around wringing their hands and searching the internet for replacement parts.”
― Jennifer Niven, Breathless

“All these words and stories. My mom calls them the color of a human life: those little moments that are so uniquely ours.”
― Jennifer Niven, Breathless

“I think about how amazing it is that you can have someone that close to you, that for the first time you literally aren't alone in your body anymore. Yet somehow you can still feel lonely.”
― Jennifer Niven, Breathless

“Because it always ends the same, right? You have a good time and they have a good time and everyone's having fun, and then once the chase is over, suddenly they start chasing after someone else like you never existed. Besides, I like being me too much.”
― Jennifer Niven, Breathless

“What does it feel like to be in love?”
‘…I take my time answering because I’m not sure how to answer. It’s more emotion than words, and I’ve never really thought about to describe it. I think of the fear and doubt and worry that come with all this feeling. The questioning and the opening up about every little thing until you feel like a frog on a dissection table, completely exposed. The caring too much, or maybe just enough, and the scariness that comes with that. The fact that there is one person on this earth who has the ability to hurt you more than any other because that’s how much you love them. The having to trust that they won’t and that maybe, just maybe, they mean what they say and that, at least for a while, they can be your floor.’
“When it’s with the right person, you feel invincible and seen and at home, no matter where you are in the world.”
― Jennifer Niven, Breathless

“You’re perfect.”
“I’m not. No one is, thank God. Otherwise what a boring world this would be. There are so many things I wish I’d done differently at the time, including with your dad. But we can only pay attention, hope we learn something, try not to fuck up again – at least not in the same exact way – and keep going forward, knowing that we’re absolutely going to fuck up. A lot. Sorry. The important thing is to do your best, always, to not be too hard on yourself when you don’t, and let go of regrets.”
― Jennifer Niven, Breathless

“I am being as honest with myself as possible, which is harder than it sounds. Who wouldn’t rather write down pretty things and pretend they are the truth?’
“My photos are a way of telling stories but without the pressure of all those words. I used to think of them as a way to capture everything that’s good. Everything my life wasn’t. but now I take pictures of all of it: the sad, the disturbing, the ugly.”
― Jennifer Niven, Breathless

“It can get kind of nerve-racking when you realise how isolated you are from the actual world here. But all the scary stuff doesn’t really compare to getting lost in your own mind.”
― Jennifer Niven, Breathless

“You could never be a consolation prize, Captain. You’re like that giant purple carnival bear, as big as a fucking SUV, that costs a bazillion tickets. The one you knock yourself out trying to win by playing Whac-A-Mole and Shoot-the-Duck and whatever else you have to do so that you can bring it home.”
― Jennifer Niven, Breathless