We Were Never Here Quotes

“Just because a feeling is real doesn’t mean it’s true.”
― Andrea Bartz, We Were Never Here

“Power is a funny thing. You know how they say that the opposite of love isn’t hate, it’s indifference? Like, we’re looking at the scale all wrong.” She tapped her nail against the glass. “I think it’s the same thing with fear. The opposite of fear isn’t safety. It’s power.”
― Andrea Bartz, We Were Never Here

“All the hand-wringing about women tempting fate by going on adventures, how it was our responsibility to protect ourselves…wasn’t it simply a way to keep women’s lives small? To keep us cowering at home, controlled, contained?”
― Andrea Bartz, We Were Never Here

“I'd been so focused on running away, I'd almost missed what I was running to.”
― Andrea Bartz, We Were Never Here

“Edit the feed to limit the hysteria.”
― Andrea Bartz, We Were Never Here

“I thought back to a soliloquy I’d seen on TV about pain as women’s birthright. It’s not hard to catalog the dazzling torment life puts us through: childbirth and menstrual cramps and the suffocating heat of menopause. We do our best to avoid it, but men run toward it: war and wrestling and football that cracks their skulls, bruises the fragile gray matter underneath. Their bravado is just them manufacturing their own pain, trying to seem strong. But fear—fear is at least as strong a motivator as pain. Maybe the TV show had it wrong; maybe men aren’t out to experience pain so much as fear, the icy jolt of feeling alive. They crave it because they have no idea how miserable it is to feel that frigid blast a hundred times a day.”
― Andrea Bartz, We Were Never Here

“I thought back to a soliloquy I’d seen on TV about pain as women’s birthright. It’s not hard to catalog the dazzling torment life puts us through: childbirth and menstrual cramps and the suffocating heat of menopause. We do our best to avoid it, but men run toward it: war and wrestling and football that cracks their skulls, bruises the fragile gray matter underneath. Their bravado is just them manufacturing their own pain, trying to seem strong. But fear—fear is at least as strong a motivator as pain. Maybe the TV show had it wrong; maybe men aren’t out to experience pain so much as fear, the icy jolt of feeling alive. They crave it because they have no idea how miserable it is to feel that frigid blast a hundred times a day. I”
― Andrea Bartz, We Were Never Here

“Breathed louder, harder, both of our breaths rhythmic and sultry, until all that existed was the feeling, deep and tender and raw.”
― Andrea Bartz, We Were Never Here

“Cognitive behavioral therapy is kind of the same thing: You examine your thoughts like a scientist so you can challenge the ones that don’t hold up. So let’s look at this fear, this belief or, or thought pattern you’ve noticed. Just because a feeling is real doesn’t mean it’s true.”
― Andrea Bartz, We Were Never Here

“Who knows what else is unwittingly documented in people’s phones and hard drives and dusty photo albums, background noise that would swell with meaning to a different audience?”
― Andrea Bartz, We Were Never Here

“My brain was like minnows in a pail: Thoughts crisscrossed and swarmed and bumped into one another.”
― Andrea Bartz, We Were Never Here

“My cry scattered through the trees, reverberated around the lake, rose toward the umbrella of stars.”
― Andrea Bartz, We Were Never Here

“Or even a solo trip - if the yoga teacher was correct, wasn't it my duty as a human being with eyes and legs and a beat-beat-beating heart to experience things, to explore? All the hand-wringing about women tempting fate by going on adventures, how it was our responsibility to protect ourselves... wasn't it simply a way to keep women's lives small? To keep us cowering at home, controlled, contained?”
― Andrea Bartz, We Were Never Here

“The irony: I'd been thrilled when Aaron noticed me, and when, tonight, he called me his girlfriend. But on the street, I tried to creep past any other male gazes, ghostlike. That's womanhood, I suppose, both craving and feeling repulsed by attention.”
― Andrea Bartz, We Were Never Here

“But my best friend, she lives in Australia, but even so, she was there for me every single day during that period. Piecing me together until I started to feel like myself again. But then…”
― Andrea Bartz, We Were Never Here

“I think it’s the same thing with fear. The opposite of fear isn’t safety. It’s power.”
― Andrea Bartz, We Were Never Here

“Power is a funny thing. You know how they say that the opposite of love isn’t hate, it’s indifference?”
― Andrea Bartz, We Were Never Here

“But fear—fear is at least as strong a motivator as pain.”
― Andrea Bartz, We Were Never Here

“Hi ho, hi ho, it’s off to bury a body we go.”
― Andrea Bartz, We Were Never Here

“I thought back to a soliloquy I’d seen on TV about pain as women’s birthright. It’s not hard to catalog the dazzling torment life puts us through: childbirth and menstrual cramps and the suffocating heat of menopause. We do our best to avoid it, but men run toward it: war and wrestling and football that cracks their skulls, bruises the fragile gray matter underneath. Their bravado is just them manufacturing their own pain, trying to seem strong.”
― Andrea Bartz, We Were Never Here

“In a particularly creepy twist, Kristen’s former employer revealed that the company’s Australian branch had fired Kristen two weeks before our Chile trip. Why? Because she’d assaulted her boss, Lucas, at a company outing. Apparently she shoved the tiny man into a shelf of liquor bottles following an altercation. Another disturbing detail:”
― Andrea Bartz, We Were Never Here

“The face of a fighter, a boxer. A Spanish-American man beaten to death by a beautiful American visitor.”
― Andrea Bartz, We Were Never Here

“So much power. So much confidence. Confidence—that was another item on the list of traits the modern woman is supposed to exude. Not vanity, not Kardashian bluster, but a deep fearlessness, Lizzo Vibes, Beyoncé Power. Big Dick Energy.”
― Andrea Bartz, We Were Never Here

“Would she really be that self-destructive, blowing up both of our lives like an extremist with a bomb strapped to her torso?”
― Andrea Bartz, We Were Never Here

“One, two, three, four, five dead bodies. My subconscious kept counting, kept scraping at our friendship like an art restorer chiseling the grime off the truth.”
― Andrea Bartz, We Were Never Here

“Some people would say that hijacking your birthday plans is not respecting your boundaries.”
― Andrea Bartz, We Were Never Here

“For starters, she refuses to even acknowledge the wealthy developer teaming up with the LAPD to find us. Her behavior when we’d found the CNN article had been so bizarre that a part of me kept whispering, Was that insincere?”
― Andrea Bartz, We Were Never Here

“How could she remain so blasé about the discovery of Paolo’s body? And our conversation on Thursday, when she’d briefly convinced me she was as shaken as I was—why did that now feel like a trick, a trap?”
― Andrea Bartz, We Were Never Here

“Nice girls don’t walk around with anger brewing in their chest. With blood on their palms and dirt under their nails from participating in their own late-night horror story.”
― Andrea Bartz, We Were Never Here

“My problem-solving instinct clanged on, the same knack that makes me so good at escape rooms and brainteasers and my job as a project manager. Maybe focusing hard on this simple problem—door is locked; we need what’s behind it—would distract me from the larger and more horrifying issue on our hands.”
― Andrea Bartz, We Were Never Here