Nina LaCour, Hold Still
20 quotes
"How it's so easy for her to not feel anything at all, to be just completely gone, to not be around to see how fucked up she's made me. She got to disappear completely and I feel like I'm about to combust."
"This is what I want so don't be sad."
"No," I say. "I didn't know that," and as I say it I feel flooded with bitterness at all the things Ingrid kept secret from me."
"That's what friends do: they notice things. They're there for each other. They see what parents don't."
"I was such a quiet kid, so shy and calm and in my own head. Of course I knew about being sad. Maybe that's the reason I saved all the things I thought were pretty."
"He is Romeo, and he is heartbroken. Every word is wistful. When he says, 'O, teach me how I should forget to think!' I, for the first time, see what the big deal is about Shakespeare."
"The sun stopped shining for me is all. The whole story is: I am sad. I am sad all the time and the sadness is so heavy that I can't get away from it. Not ever."
"my life is just waiting for you to get started."
"The first time she carved something into her skin, she used the sharp tip of an X-Acto knife. She lifted up her shirt to show me after the cuts had scabbed over. She had scrawled F*** YOU on her stomach. I stood quiet for a moment, feeling the breath get knocked out of me. I should have grabbed her arm and taken her straight to the nurse's office, into that small room with two cots covered in paper sheets and the sweet, stale medicinal"
"My best friend is dead, and I could have saved her. It’s so wrong so completely and painfully wrong, that I walked through my front door tonight smiling."
"My room is so quiet and empty it hurts."
"There are so many things that I want so badly to tell you but I just can't."
"And I want to tell you about everything but I can't because I couldn't stand for you to have that look on your face all the time. I just need you to look at me and think that I'm normal. I just really need that from you."
"Each time a breeze starts, I feel the air all the way through me."
"When the bell rings, and lunch is over, I decide to come back here tomorrow, and the next day. I tell myself it really isn’t that bad."
"I sleep through the next day. Each time I go to the bathroom, I try not to look in the mirror. Once, I catch my reflection: it looks like I’ve been punched in both eyes.I can’t talk about the day that follows that."
"This was me before I knew about anything hard, when my whole life was packed lunches and art projects and spelling quizzes."
"It isn't the happy ending that Ingrid and I have dreamed up, but it's all a part of what I'm working through. The way life changes. The way people and things disappear. Then appear, unexpectedly, and had you close"
"The sun stopped shining for me is all."
"...I think that people who make judgements about other people they don't even know are shallow, and people who start rumors are shallow, and I really don't care what shallow people say about me."