I'll Be You Quotes

“It was her. Younger—still a baby, really—her hair shorter; but the furrow in her forehead, the unsettling sense that she was watching you and thinking something surprisingly adult—that was unmistakably Charlotte. MISSING, the flyer read. EMMA GONZALEZ.”
― Janelle Brown, I'll Be You

“was the whole setup with Nick just a ruse to claw her back over the gap that had formed between us? Was I forcing her into another secret in order to bind her to me?”
― Janelle Brown, I'll Be You

“And what is hope but this: the blind, naive belief that things might someday be a tiny bit better than they are now.”
― Janelle Brown, I'll Be You

“Here I am, look at me. Here I am, you can’t see me at all.”
― Janelle Brown, I'll Be You

“Did I? I knew I had, once. Now I wasn’t so sure.”
― Janelle Brown, I'll Be You

“There is only the here, the now, the what it is. The only thing that we can hope to change is the path forward.”
― Janelle Brown, I'll Be You

“that I’d take forward into the rest of my life: that we are the masters of our own spin, that disaster can be reframed as triumph if only you choose to tell it that way. Say something emphatically enough, and people will believe you despite all evidence to the contrary.”
― Janelle Brown, I'll Be You

“It’s so easy for good intentions to get undone by unspoken resentments; a history of small bumps piling up until you have an insurmountable mountain of issues.”
― Janelle Brown, I'll Be You

“Perhaps addiction is just a grown-up variation of a toddler compulsion: the constant need for instant gratification.”
― Janelle Brown, I'll Be You

“The ego of a teenage girl is a vicious thing; it relies on manufactured superiority to counteract all that rampant insecurity.”
― Janelle Brown, I'll Be You

“It’s impossible to fully escape the world in which you were raised; it beats inside you, a muted pulse, always waiting for the opportunity to rush back to the surface.”
― Janelle Brown, I'll Be You

“Believe me, if you want to know how vital hope is, ask a recovered addict; they are the most hopeful people in the world, because they know what it means to be so low that there are only two viable paths left: up, or death.”
― Janelle Brown, I'll Be You

“because you had to have some hope in order to end up at one of these meetings. Otherwise, you’d already be dead.”
― Janelle Brown, I'll Be You

“There are moments in life when you collide with something that sends you careening down a path from which you can never return. We are ping-pong balls, paddled about by fate and coincidence, doing our best to wrestle back some agency from the forces that move our lives. On our deathbeds, our last thoughts a faint echo: what if, what if, what if.”
― Janelle Brown, I'll Be You

“Or maybe we just choose the drugs that amplify the instincts we already have, that let us be our unedited selves: paranoid, slothful, amped-up, wild. Our ids cranked up to one hundred.”
― Janelle Brown, I'll Be You