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
Stephanie Perkins
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“If I stress about a goal, I won't remember to find the way to get there.”
― Zoltan Andrejkovics, quote from The Invisible Game: The Mindset of a Winning Team
“As far as I was concerned men were something you had around the place, not particularly interesting, but quite harmless. I had never shown the slightest feeling for them, and apart from my never wearing a skirt, saw nothing else in common between us.”
― Jeanette Winterson, quote from Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit
“Nervous sweat gathered on my palms, and for once I was glad I couldn't talk. I swallowed, my throat clenching around the scream scalding me from the inside. The gray haze was darker now, though no thicker. I could see through it easily, yet it tainted everything my terrified gaze landed on , as if the entire gym had been draped in a translucent cloud of smog. And things still moved on the edge of my vision, drawing my eye first in one direction, then another .
I would have given anything to be able to speak in that moment, not just to warn Emma—
because that was evidently a moot point—
but to ask Nash what the hell was going on. Could he see what I saw? More important, could they see us?”
― Rachel Vincent, quote from My Soul to Take
“If I could paint, I would do it myself.”
― Wendy Mass, quote from A Mango-Shaped Space
“Yet each disappointment Ted felt in his wife, each incremental deflation, was accompanied by a seizure of guilt; many years ago, he had taken the passion he felt for Susan and folded it in half, so he no longer had a drowning, helpless feeling when he glimpsed her beside him in bed: her ropy arms and soft, generous ass. Then he’d folded it in half again, so when he felt desire for Susan, it no longer brought with it an edgy terror of never being satisfied. Then in half again, so that feeling desire entailed no immediate need to act. Then in half again, so he hardly felt it. His desire was so small in the end that Ted could slip it inside his desk or a pocket and forget about it, and this gave him a feeling of safety and accomplishment, of having dismantled a perilous apparatus that might have crushed them both. Susan was baffled at first, then distraught; she’d hit him twice across the face; she’d run from the house in a thunderstorm and slept at a motel; she’d wrestled Ted to the bedroom floor in a pair of black crotchless underpants. But eventually a sort of amnesia had overtaken Susan; her rebellion and hurt had melted away, deliquesced into a sweet, eternal sunniness that was terrible in the way that life would be terrible, Ted supposed, without death to give it gravitas and shape. He’d presumed at first that her relentless cheer was mocking, another phase in her rebellion, until it came to him that Susan had forgotten how things were between them before Ted began to fold up his desire; she’d forgotten and was happy — had never not been happy — and while all of this bolstered his awe at the gymnastic adaptability of the human mind, it also made him feel that his wife had been brainwashed. By him.”
― Jennifer Egan, quote from A Visit from the Goon Squad
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