Vanessa > Vanessa's Quotes

“And even if you do wear a maid outfit, it doesn't change the fact that you're strong or that you're smart or that you try really hard at everything you do. I think you'd still deserve to walk with your head held high.”
― Hiro Fujiwara, Maid-sama! Vol. 01

“Pretty fucking tragic twist of fate, but you don’t seem to remember that we first met years ago. An issue, since I remember a little too well. I like no one, absolutely no one, but I liked you from the start. I liked you when I didn’t know you, and now that I do know you it’s only gotten worse. Sometimes, often, always, I think about you before falling asleep. Then I dream of you, and when I wake up my head’s still there, stuck on something funny, beautiful, filthy, intelligent that’s all about you. It’s been going on for a while, longer than you think, longer than you can imagine, and I should have told you, but I have this impression, this certainty that you’re half a second from running away, that I should give you enough reasons to stay. Is there anything I can do for you? I’ll take you grocery shopping and fill your fridge when we’re back home. Buy you a new bike and a case of decent reagent and that sludge you drink. Kill the people who made you cry. Is there something you need? Name it. It’s yours. If I have it, it’s yours.”
― Ali Hazelwood, The Love Hypothesis

“She was never going to get used to the fact that professors were real people and had first names—”
― Ali Hazelwood, The Love Hypothesis

“I must say, the line between excellent career choice and critical life screwup is getting a bit blury.”
― Ali Hazelwood, The Love Hypothesis

“Oh, wow. Thank you.” She smiled. “Now I’m actually a bit sorry that I can’t have you on my dissertation committee. Perhaps rumors of your cruelty have been greatly exaggerated.” His mouth twitched. “Maybe you just pull out the best in me?” She grinned. “Then maybe I should stick around. Just, you know, to save the department from your terrible moods?” He glanced at the picture of the failed Western blot in her hand. “Well, it doesn’t look like you’re going to graduate anytime soon.” She half laughed, half gasped. “Oh my God. Did you just—?” “Objectively—” “This is the rudest, meanest thing—” She was laughing. Holding her stomach as she waved her finger at him. “—based on your blotting—” “—that anyone could ever say to a Ph.D. student. Ever.” “I think I can find meaner things. If I really put myself to it.” “We’re done.” She wished she weren’t smiling. Then maybe he’d take her seriously instead of just looking at her with that patient, amused expression. “Seriously. It was nice while it lasted.” She made to stand and leave indignantly, but he grabbed the sleeve of her shirt and gently tugged at it until she was sitting down again, next to him on the narrow couch—maybe even a little closer than before. She continued glaring, but he regarded her blandly, clearly unperturbed. “There’s nothing bad about taking more than five years to graduate,” he offered in a conciliatory tone. Olive huffed. “You just want me to stay around forever. Until you have the biggest, fattest, strongest Title IX case to ever exist.”
― Ali Hazelwood, The Love Hypothesis

“For anyone who has been taught that good equals small and silent, here is my heart with all its ugly tangles and splendid fury.”
― E. Lockhart, Genuine Fraud

“Books were, and always would be, something a little magic and something to respect.”
― Sally Thorne, The Hating Game

“How You Doing, Little Lucy?” His bright tone and mild expression indicates we’re playing a game we almost never play. It’s a game called How You Doing? and it basically starts off like we don’t hate each other. We act like normal colleagues who don’t want to swirl their hands in each other’s blood. It’s disturbing.

“Great, thanks, Big Josh. How You Doing?”

“Super. Gonna go get coffee. Can I get you some tea?” He has his heavy black mug in his hand. I hate his mug.

I look down; my hand is already holding my red polka-dot mug. He’d spit in anything he made me. Does he think I’m crazy? “I think I’ll join you.”

We march purposefully toward the kitchen with identical footfalls, left, right, left, right, like prosecutors walking toward the camera in the opening credits of Law & Order. It requires me to almost double my stride. Colleagues break off conversations and look at us with speculative expressions. Joshua and I look at each other and bare our teeth. Time to act civil. Like executives.

“Ah-ha-ha,” we say to each other genially at some pretend joke. “Ah-ha-ha.”

We sweep around a corner. Annabelle turns from the photocopier and almost drops her papers. “What’s happening?”

Joshua and I nod at her and continue striding, unified in our endless game of one-upmanship. My short striped dress flaps from the g-force.

“Mommy and Daddy love you very much, kids,” Joshua says quietly so only I can hear him. To the casual onlooker he is politely chatting. A few meerkat heads have popped up over cubicle walls. It seems we’re the stuff of legend. “Sometimes we get excited and argue. But don’t be scared. Even when we’re arguing, it’s not your fault.”

“It’s just grown-up stuff,” I softly explain to the apprehensive faces we pass. “Sometimes Daddy sleeps on the couch, but it’s okay. We still love you.”
― Sally Thorne, The Hating Game

“It's a corporate truth universally acknowledged that workers would rather eat rat skeletons than participate in group activities.”
― Sally Thorne, The Hating Game

“I love you, Lucy Hutton. So much, you have no idea. Please be my best friend.”
― Sally Thorne

“He glances over his shoulder, no doubt hearing my insanely loud shoes stop in their tracks. Then he looks again. It’s a double take for the record books.

“I’m out stalking,” I call. It doesn’t come out the way I’d intended. It’s not lighthearted or funny. It comes out like a warning. I’m one scary bitch right now. I hold my hands up to show I’m not armed. My heart is racing.

“Me too,” he replies. Another cab cruises past like a shark.

“Where are you actually going?” My voice rings down the empty street.

“I just told you. I’m going out stalking.”

“What, on foot?” I come closer by another six paces. “You were going to walk?”

“I was going to run down the middle of the street like the Terminator.”

The laugh blasts out of me like bah.I’m breaking one of my rules by grinning at him, but I can’t seem to stop.

“You’re on foot, after all. Stilts.” He gestures at my sky-high shoes.

“It gives me a few extra inches of height to look through your garbage.”

“Find anything of interest?” He strolls closer and stops until we have maybe ten paces between us. I can almost pick up the scent of his skin.

“Pretty much what I was expecting. Vegetable scraps, coffee grounds, adult diapers.”
― Sally Thorne, The Hating Game

“But I'm shocked by the tenderness in his voice. The sincerity with which he wants to know. He's like a feral dog, crazed and wild, thirsty for chaos, simultaneously aching for recognition and acceptance.
Love.”
― Tahereh Mafi, Shatter Me

“I spent my life folded between the pages of books. In the absence of human relationships, I formed bonds with paper characters.”
― Tahereh Mafi, Shatter Me

“My body is a carnivorous flower, a poisonous houseplant, a loaded gun with a million triggers and he's more than ready to fire.”
― Tahereh Mafi, Shatter Me

“People seldom realize that they tell lies with their lips and truths with their eyes all the time.”
― Tahereh Mafi, Destroy Me

“And I've fallen.

So hard.

I've hit the ground. Gone right through it. Never in my life have I felt this. Nothing like this. I've felt shame and cowardice, weakness and strength. I've known terror and indifference, self-hate and general disgust. I've seen things that cannot be unseen.

And yet I've known nothing like this terrible, horrible, paralyzing feeling. I feel crippled. Desperate and out of control. And it keeps getting worse. Every day I feel sick. Empty and somehow aching.

Love is a heartless bastard.”
― Tahereh Mafi, Destroy Me

“I’ve come to believe that the most dangerous man in the world is the one who feels no remorse. The one who never apologizes and therefore seeks no forgiveness. Because in the end it is our emotions that make us week, not our actions.”
― Tahereh Mafi, Destroy Me

“My mind is a warehouse of carefully organized human emotions.
I lock away the things that do not serve me.”
― Tahereh Mafi, Destroy Me

“These letters are all I have left.
26 friends to tell my stories to.
26 letters are all I need. I can stitch them together to create oceans and ecosystems. I can fit them together to form planets and solar systems. I can use letters to construct skyscrapers and metropolitan cities populated by people, places, things, and ideas that are more real to me than these 4 walls.
I need nothing but letters to live. Without them I would not exist.
Because these words I write down are the only proof I have that I’m still alive.”
― Tahereh Mafi, Destroy Me

“My opinions,” I say to him, quietly this time, “should not so easily break your own. Stand by your convictions. Form clear and logical arguments. Even if I disagree.”
― Tahereh Mafi, Destroy Me

“She searches me with those odd, blue-green eyes and I feel guilty so suddenly, without understanding why. But there’s something about the way she looks at me that always makes me feel insignificant, as if she’s the only one who’s realized I’m entirely hollow inside. She’s found the cracks in this cast I’m forced to wear every day, and it petrifies me. That this girl would know exactly how to shatter me.”
― Tahereh Mafi, Destroy Me

“Sometimes I wish I could step outside of myself for a while. I want to leave this worn body behind, but my chains are too many, my weights too heavy.”
― Tahereh Mafi, Destroy Me

“Sometimes I close my eyes and paint these walls a different color. I imagine I’m wearing warm socks and sitting by a fire. I imagine someone’s given me a book to read, a story to take me away form the torture of my own mind. I want to be someone else somewhere else with something else to fill my mind. I want to run, to feel the wind tug at my hair. I want to pretend that this is just a story within a story. That this cell is just a scene, that these hands don’t belong to me, that this window leads to somewhere beautiful if only I could break it. I pretend this pillow is clean, I pretend this bed is soft. I pretend and pretend and pretend until the world becomes so breathtaking behind my eyelids that I can no longer contain it. But then my eyes fly open and I’m caught around the throat by a pair of hands that won’t stop suffocating suffocating suffocating. My thoughts, I think, will soon be sound. My mind, I hope, will soon be found.”
― Tahereh Mafi, Destroy Me

“I have an extremely low threshold for disorder; it offends my very being.”
― Tahereh Mafi, Destroy Me

“Sir, can you hear me?" Another cry. But this time, a voice I don't detest.
"Sire, please, can you hear me-"
"I've been shot, Delalieu," I manage to say. I open my eyes. Look into his watery ones. "I haven't gone deaf.”
― Tahereh Mafi, Destroy Me

“Books are easily destroyed. But words will live as long as people can remember them.”
― Tahereh Mafi, Unravel Me

“I want to be the friend you fall hopelessly in love with. The one you take into your arms and into your bed and into the private world you keep trapped in your head. I want to be that kind of friend. The one who will memorize the things you say as well as the shape of your lips when you say them. I want to know every curve, every freckle, every shiver of your body.

I want to know where to touch you, I want to know how to touch you. I want to know convince you to design a smile just for me. Yes, I do want to be your friend. I want to be your best friend in the entire world.”
― Tahereh Mafi, Unravel Me

“Loneliness is a strange sort of thing.
It creeps on you, quiet and still, sits by your side in the dark, strokes by your hair as you sleep. It wraps itself around your bones, squeezing so tight you almost can't breathe. It leaves lies in your heart, lies next to you at night, leaches the light out of every corner. It's a constant companion, clasping your hand only to yank you down when you're struggling to stand up.
You wake up in the morning and wonder who you are. You fail to fall asleep at night and tremble in your skin. You doubt you doubt you doubt.
do I
don't I
should I
why won't I
And even when you're ready to let go. When you're ready to break free. When you're ready to be brand-new. Loneliness is an old friend stand beside you in the mirror, looking you in the eye, challenging you to live your life without it. You can't find the words to fight yourself, to fight the words screaming that you're not enough never enough never ever enough.
Loneliness is a bitter, wretched companion.
Sometimes it just won't let go.”
― Tahereh Mafi, Unravel Me

“On the darkest days you have to search for a spot of brightness, on the coldest days you have to seek out a spot of warmth; on the bleakest days you have to keep your eyes onward and upward and on the saddest days you have to leave them open to let them cry. To then let them dry. To give them a chance to wash out the pain in order to see fresh and clear once again.”
― Tahereh Mafi, Unravel Me

“Are you kidding?” I stop in the middle of the kitchen. Spin around. My face is pulled together in disbelief. “You’ve spoken to me maybe once in the two weeks I’ve been here. I hardly even notice you anymore.”

“Okay, hold up,” he says, turning to block my path. “We both know there’s no way you haven’t noticed all of this” — he gestures to himself — “so if you’re trying to play games with me, I should let you know up front that it’s not going to work.”

“What?” I frown. “What are you talking abou—”

“You can’t play hard to get, kid.” He raises an eyebrow. “I can’t even touch you. Takes ‘hard to get’ to a whole new level, if you know what I mean.”

“Oh my God,” I mouth, eyes closed, shaking my head. “You are insane.”

He falls to his knees. “Insane for your sweet, sweet love!”
― Tahereh Mafi, Unravel Me