Quotes from Bittersweet

Sarah Ockler ·  378 pages

Rating: (11.4K votes)


“Would 'sorry' have made any difference? Does it ever? It's just a word. One word against a thousand actions.”
― Sarah Ockler, quote from Bittersweet


“It takes forty muscles to frown, and only twelve to jam a cupcake in your mouth and get over it.”
― Sarah Ockler, quote from Bittersweet


“But once in a while, you pick the right thing, the exact best thing. Every day, the moment you open your eyes and pull off your blankets, that's what you hope for. The sunshine on your face,warm enough to make you heart sing.”
― Sarah Ockler, quote from Bittersweet


“I've never met a problem a proper cupcake couldn't fix.”
― Sarah Ockler, quote from Bittersweet


“Everyone says that the internet is so awesome because you can connect with people from all over the world, but I think it’s the opposite. The internet doesn’t make it easier to connect with anyone—it just makes it so you don’t really have to.”
― Sarah Ockler, quote from Bittersweet



“I'm not sure if you even want me around or if you just feel sorry for me. I'm not sure of anything.”
― Sarah Ockler, quote from Bittersweet


“All the little quirks that make even the most barren, frigid places beautiful, that make a tiny gray dot on the map the one place you'll always call home, no matter where your glamorous, boring, adventurous, average, ridiculous, impossible, epic, romantic, bacon-infused life leads you.”
― Sarah Ockler, quote from Bittersweet


“We can get used to just about anything but it doesn't mean it's okay”
― Sarah Ockler, quote from Bittersweet


“No matter what happens next, I'm not letting this turn into another two weeks of silence, the entire history of us summed up in a series of near misses and almosts just because neither of us had the snowballs to say anything.”
― Sarah Ockler, quote from Bittersweet


“When you're out here alone, contemplating all the things you didn't do and the person you didn't become ... if you think about it too long a hush seeps into the gray space, and the wind will hollow out your bones, and the purest kind of loneliness comes up from the inside to swallow you like an avalanche.”
― Sarah Ockler, quote from Bittersweet



“Abby's my sister, Hudson. We're twins."

"Oh thank God! I mean thank God... that you... have a sister... what a special... um, napkin?”
― Sarah Ockler, quote from Bittersweet


“Maybe he's just... craving the meatloaf?"

Dani hops off the counter and gives me the once over. "Craving the meatloaf? Is that what the kids are calling it now?”
― Sarah Ockler, quote from Bittersweet


“What's up?" Need a kidney? Two of them? Where do I sign? I grab my pen again, just in case.”
― Sarah Ockler, quote from Bittersweet


“I like him, okay?"

"No you don't. You 'well I'm un I don't know um I guess yeah maybe' him.”
― Sarah Ockler, quote from Bittersweet


“Being with Josh is like being touched from the inside out. An unexpected blaze of sunshine on an otherwise bleak winter day. Wrapping your fingers around a mug of hot chocolate after walking home in that frigid lake-effect wind. A fire crackling softly beneath your outstretched hands. The perfect combination of cupcake and icing, the kind where you can’t quite identify all the secret ingredients, but you feel them melting together on your tongue, and you know that for as long you live, this will be the best thing you’ve ever tasted.”
― Sarah Ockler, quote from Bittersweet



“What do you need, Josh? Just name it. Anything. I'm totally here for you.

I knew I could count on you, Hudson. The thing is... I don't know if I'm a good kisser. It's not the sort of thing you can figure out on your own, you know? So I was thinking, if it wouldn't be too much trouble, maybe you could kiss me, everyday for a year, and then you can...

"Hudson?”
― Sarah Ockler, quote from Bittersweet


“Why did he leave so fast at the end? Who was on the phone? A girl? That's it, he must have a girlfriend. One from another school. One he was just about to call so he could propose to her, but I interrupted, and then he had to run off to take her call, because weddings don't just plan themselves, you know.”
― Sarah Ockler, quote from Bittersweet


“When it's like this, I don't notice the cold. I don't hear the wind howling through the empty spaces. I don't feel like a small, broken-winged bird trapped in a rusty cage.”
― Sarah Ockler, quote from Bittersweet


“See, some people politely encourage their tone-deaf friends to sing. Some people even convince them to go on live television and audition for national competitions. But me? I am not that friend.”
― Sarah Ockler, quote from Bittersweet


“...if I let him walk away now, we'll forever be a "just"; Just hockey player and skating coach. Just music swappers. Just friends. A not-quite-almost whose time passed through as quickly as the train, fading into the distance before it even had a real chance at staying, at becoming something more, because I didn't speak up.”
― Sarah Ockler, quote from Bittersweet



“What good are all those bits of nostalgia when the one thing that truly holds you to a place - the one thing that really makes it home over any other dot on the map - crumbles?”
― Sarah Ockler, quote from Bittersweet


“Sometimes life rocks so hard your heart wants to explode just because the sun came up and you got to feel it on your face for one more day. ...Sometimes you get the bitter end instead.”
― Sarah Ockler, quote from Bittersweet


“I think you're beautiful," an old man at the counter - one of our Sunday night fixtures - says.
...
"You passed the Earl test," she says as she pours him a fresh cup.

"Ma, he says that to anyone who still has their own teeth. No offense, Earl."

"None taken," he says. "But you got your own hair too, so you're twice as pretty.”
― Sarah Ockler, quote from Bittersweet


“Anyway, what about you? How's, um, Abby? Angie? What's her name?"
Oh, Hudson. Your suavity is an example to us all.
― Sarah Ockler, quote from Bittersweet


“Some people call it child labor. I call it... let's not get technical.”
― Sarah Ockler, quote from Bittersweet



“Because maybe Watonka was only ever supposed to be a temporary stopover, and maybe I will chase that train over the hill, and maybe we're all destined to leave this place, for sure, for real, together or alone. But for right now, we're here.”
― Sarah Ockler, quote from Bittersweet


“Have some carrots. They're good for your eyes."
"Then you have some fries. They're good for your... I don't know. They're just good.”
― Sarah Ockler, quote from Bittersweet


“No powdery residue. But definitely suspicious. Smell." He slides a makeup catalog from beneath a microscope made out of a plate, a toilet paper roll, and an intricate arrangement of pipe cleaners. "Any ideas?"

I take a scientific whiff. "Gardenia. Looks like those Mary Kay terrorists are at it again.”
― Sarah Ockler, quote from Bittersweet


“No one wants to do it with a chick who smells like bacon."

Her brow creases. "Everybody loves bacon.”
― Sarah Ockler, quote from Bittersweet


“Mom asked for a cupcake miracle? Well, here comes the freaking holy angel of icing, at your service. --Hudson

Angel icing? That's the craziest, corniest, most whack-ass stuff I've heard in my life
― Sarah Ockler, quote from Bittersweet



About the author

Sarah Ockler
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“Charlotte: Giordano is terribly afraid Gwyneth will get everything wrong tomorrow that she can get wrong.
Gideon: Pass the olive oil, please.
Charlotte: Politics and history are a closed book to Gwyneth. She can’t even remember names—they go in at one ear and straight out of the other. She can’t help it, her brain doesn’t have the capacity. It’s stuffed with the names of boy bands and long, long cast lists of actors in soppy romantic films.
Raphael: Gwyneth is your time-traveling cousin, right? I saw her yesterday in school. Isn’t she the one with long dark hair and blue eyes?
Charlotte: Yes, and that birthmark on her temple, the one that looks like a little banana.
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