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
“Even galaxy-spanning anarchist utopias of stupefying full-spectrum civilisational power have turf wars within their unacknowledged militaries.”
― Iain M. Banks, quote from Matter
“I have no aspiration here to reclaim mystery and paradox from whatever territory they might inhabit, for there is, indeed, often a killing in a kiss, a mercy in the slap that heats your face . . . There is, nevertheless, a particular poverty in those alloplasts who, addressing tragedy, seek to subdistinguish motives beyond those we have best, because nearest, at hand, and so it is with love and hate--emotions upon whose necks, whether wrung or wreathed, may be found the oldest fingerprints of man. A simple truth intrudes: the basic instincts of every man to every man are known. But who knows when or where or how? For the answers to such questions, summon Augurello, your personal jurisconsult and theological wiseacre, to teach you about primal reality and then to dispel those complexities and cabals you crouch behind in this sad, psychiatric century you call your own. It is the anti-labyrinths of the world that scare. Here is a story for you. Your chair.”
― Alexander Theroux, quote from Darconville’s Cat
“The heart did ache, actually. She felt a dull grind of lack somewhere near her diaphragm, a pain that occupied the space of something removed. A phantom limb. A scratchy hunger. The wasting muscle fatigue of want.”
― Sylvia Brownrigg, quote from Pages for You
“That’s okay, baby. I don’t need to know your name, just need to know how hard you like it.”
― River Savage, quote from Incandescent
“Do you know that hobo is an acronym for Homeward Bound?”
― Miriam Toews, quote from All My Puny Sorrows
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