Stephanie Perkins · 321 pages
Rating: (30.2K votes)
“You're a kaleidoscope, you change every time I look away.”
― Stephanie Perkins, quote from My True Love Gave to Me: Twelve Holiday Stories
“He says presents aren't important, but I think they are - not because of how much they cost, but for the opportunity they provide to say I understand you.”
― Stephanie Perkins, quote from My True Love Gave to Me: Twelve Holiday Stories
“Would you rather be great at something you like, or just okay at something you love?”
― Stephanie Perkins, quote from My True Love Gave to Me: Twelve Holiday Stories
“I guess I don't really know what I want to do, either. Sometimes I feel like a shook-up bottle of soda. Like, I have all this passion that wants to explode, but I don't know where to aim it yet.”
― Stephanie Perkins, quote from My True Love Gave to Me: Twelve Holiday Stories
“I need you to be my person. I need to see you. And hear you. I need you to stay alive. And I need you to stop kissing other people just because they're standing next to you when the ball drops.”
― Stephanie Perkins, quote from My True Love Gave to Me: Twelve Holiday Stories
“But people don't need to remember how it felt to be happy and safe in the past. They need to have hope that they can get there again in the future.”
― Stephanie Perkins, quote from My True Love Gave to Me: Twelve Holiday Stories
“Sometimes I felt like I was waiting for my life to begin and more than anything, in that moment, I wanted to force some kind of beginning. I wanted things to be different than usual. I wanted to bend reality.”
― Stephanie Perkins, quote from My True Love Gave to Me: Twelve Holiday Stories
“Shame leads to secrets, and secrets lead to lies, and lies ruin everything.”
― Stephanie Perkins, quote from My True Love Gave to Me: Twelve Holiday Stories
“Noel was her very best friend - even if she wasn't his. Noel was her person.”
― Stephanie Perkins, quote from My True Love Gave to Me: Twelve Holiday Stories
“Love was love.
But she hoped that he was not a dragon.”
― Stephanie Perkins, quote from My True Love Gave to Me: Twelve Holiday Stories
“We all love and we all lose and we go on loving just the same.”
― Stephanie Perkins, quote from My True Love Gave to Me: Twelve Holiday Stories
“I am here, and he is here, and everything I need to know is that I will hold him and he will hold me until I am warm again, until I know I belong. (Your Temporary Santa)”
― Stephanie Perkins, quote from My True Love Gave to Me: Twelve Holiday Stories
“Not that kind of cheating," Mags said. "More like...skipping ahead. If you like someone, you should have to make an effort. You should have to get to know the person--you should have to work for that first kiss.”
― Stephanie Perkins, quote from My True Love Gave to Me: Twelve Holiday Stories
“Christmas Eve is my favorite... I think the anticipation is more fun than anything else. I kind of lost that. The idea that something - food, traditions, an arbitrary date on the calendar - can be special because we decide it should be. We make it special. Not just for ourselves, but for others.”
― Stephanie Perkins, quote from My True Love Gave to Me: Twelve Holiday Stories
“I sang because that is what I do when I am happy and when I'm sad. I sang because it is who I am when I am being the best possible version of me.”
― Stephanie Perkins, quote from My True Love Gave to Me: Twelve Holiday Stories
“And there - when he smiles, his whole faces lights up. It's like his other expressions are placeholders.”
― Stephanie Perkins, quote from My True Love Gave to Me: Twelve Holiday Stories
“Sweetheart, when you lose someone, you lose a little bit of yourself, too. And that missing piece? Sometimes you have to lose the rest of yourself to find it.”
― Stephanie Perkins, quote from My True Love Gave to Me: Twelve Holiday Stories
“If you let a single life event define you then all you need to change things--if you want them to change--is another.”
― Stephanie Perkins, quote from My True Love Gave to Me: Twelve Holiday Stories
“She wanted to be free, and if she could never be free, at least she wanted to be brave - brave enough not to sell herself, no matter what the payment, or the cost of refusing.”
― Stephanie Perkins, quote from My True Love Gave to Me: Twelve Holiday Stories
“You can't undo loss. You can't unmake a mistake. (What The Hell Have You Done, Sophie Roth?)”
― Stephanie Perkins, quote from My True Love Gave to Me: Twelve Holiday Stories
“The door opens with a rusted jingle, and an animatronic Santa insults my moral virtue three times. Ho, ho, ho.”
― Stephanie Perkins, quote from My True Love Gave to Me: Twelve Holiday Stories
“The feeling it gave me was an odd combination of weightless self-pity and excitement. I understood my life was meaningless, and this knowledge freed me up to accomplish absolutely anything.”
― Stephanie Perkins, quote from My True Love Gave to Me: Twelve Holiday Stories
“She was the goddess of...herself. And he could not look away from her.”
― Stephanie Perkins, quote from My True Love Gave to Me: Twelve Holiday Stories
“I stayed there on the floor like that for a long, long time.
Eating and crying.
Crying and eating.”
― Stephanie Perkins, quote from My True Love Gave to Me: Twelve Holiday Stories
“Thr rareness, the specialness, of North. Of this night. She wished it could last forever. (It's a yuletide miracle, Charlie Brown)”
― Stephanie Perkins, quote from My True Love Gave to Me: Twelve Holiday Stories
“His eyes follow me everywhere, and we keep sharing smiles that feel like secrets.(Kiersten White)”
― Stephanie Perkins, quote from My True Love Gave to Me: Twelve Holiday Stories
“I am worried about being in love, because it invelves asking so much. I am worried my life will never fit into his.”
― Stephanie Perkins, quote from My True Love Gave to Me: Twelve Holiday Stories
“Some kinds of misery make you hate the world, but some kinds make you hate yourself, and--butter and cheese not withstanding--Neve had no question that Spear was the latter.”
― Stephanie Perkins, quote from My True Love Gave to Me: Twelve Holiday Stories
“Christmas is supposed to be this time when everyone is nice to one another and forgives one another and all that, but the true meaning of Christmas is presents. And in the real world, Santa’s not fair. Rich kids get everything and poor kids get secondhand crap their parents bust their asses to afford. It costs money just to sit on Santa’s lap.”
― Stephanie Perkins, quote from My True Love Gave to Me: Twelve Holiday Stories
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“You try every trick in the book to keep her. You write her letters. You drive her to work. You quote Neruda. You compose a mass e-mail disowning all your sucias. You block their e-mails. You change your phone number. You stop drinking. You stop smoking. You claim you’re a sex addict and start attending meetings. You blame your father. You blame your mother. You blame the patriarchy. You blame Santo Domingo. You find a therapist. You cancel your Facebook. You give her the passwords to all your e-mail accounts. You start taking salsa classes like you always swore you would so that the two of you could dance together. You claim that you were sick, you claim that you were weak—It was the book! It was the pressure!—and every hour like clockwork you say that you’re so so sorry. You try it all, but one day she will simply sit up in bed and say, No more, and, Ya, and you will have to move from the Harlem apartment that you two have shared. You consider not going. You consider a squat protest. In fact, you say won’t go. But in the end you do.”
― Junot Díaz, quote from This Is How You Lose Her
“I am happy, I tried to tell him with my eyes. I'm happy with Annie; she and my work are all I'll ever need; she's happy, too-we both were till this happened...”
― Nancy Garden, quote from Annie on My Mind
“Time was nothing. Seconds were days, were years, were the breaths that caught between their mouths and the bite of Neil's fingernails against his palms, the scrape of teeth against his lower lip and the warm slide of a tongue against his.”
― Nora Sakavic, quote from The King's Men
“Once you have been in an earthquake you know, even if you survive without a scratch, that like a stroke in the heart, it remains in the earth's breast, horribly potential, always promising to return, to hit you again, with an even more devastating force. ”
― Salman Rushdie, quote from The Ground Beneath Her Feet
“At every new torment which is too hard to bear we feel yet another vein protrude, to unroll its sinuous and deadly length along our temples or beneath our eyes. And thus gradually are formed those terrible ravaged faces, of the old Rembrandt, the old Beethoven, at whom the whole world mocked. And the pockets under the eyes and the wrinkled forehead would not matter much were there not also the suffering of the heart. But since strength of one kind can change into a strength of another kind, since heat which is stored up can become light and the electricity in a flash of lightning can cause a photograph to be taken, since the dull pain in our heart can hoist above itself like a banner the visible permanence of an image for every new grief, let us accept the physical injury which is done to us for the sake of the spiritual knowledge which grief brings; let us submit to the disintegration of our body, since each new fragment which breaks away from it returns in a luminous and significant form to add itself to our work, to complete it at the price of sufferings of which others more richly endowed have no need, to make our work at least more solid as our life crumbles away beneath the corrosive action of our emotions.”
― Marcel Proust, quote from Time Regained
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