Quotes from My True Love Gave to Me: Twelve Holiday Stories

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


About the author

Stephanie Perkins
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Popular quotes

“After such knowledge, what forgiveness? Think now
History has many cunning passages, contrived corridors
And issues, deceives with whispering ambitions,
Guides us by vanities. Think now
She gives when our attention is distracted
And what she gives, gives with such supple confusions
That the giving famishes the craving. Gives too late
What’s not believed in, or if still believed,
In memory only, reconsidered passion. Gives too soon
Into weak hands, what’s thought can be dispensed with
Till the refusal propagates a fear. Think
Neither fear nor courage saves us. Unnatural vices
Are fathered by our heroism. Virtues
Are forced upon us by our impudent crimes.
These tears are shaken from the wrath-bearing tree.”
― T.S. Eliot, quote from The Waste Land and Other Poems


“Faith drives a wedge between ethics and suffering. Where certain actions cause no suffering at all, religious dogmatists still maintain that they are evil and worth of punishment (sodomy, marijuana use, homosexuality, the killing of blastocysts, etc). And yet, where suffering and death are found in abundance their causes are often deemed to be good (withholding funds for family planning in the third world, prosecuting nonviolent drug offenders, preventing stem cell research, etc). This inversion of priorities not only victimizes innocent people and squanders scarce resources; it completely falsifies our ethics. It is time we found a more reasonable approach to answering questions of right and wrong.”
― Sam Harris, quote from The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason


“I know, I'm an idiot!" Leo moaned. "A brilliant idiot, but still an idiot.”
― Rick Riordan, quote from The Demigod Diaries


“That's justice," she said, nodding at the statue. "She doesn't hear you. She doesn't see you. She can't feel you and won't speak to you. Justice, Detective Bosch, is just a concrete blonde.”
― Michael Connelly, quote from The Concrete Blonde


“Reaching up, he began using the exercise bar to do chin-ups. The repetitive act helped focus his mind as it multitasked. One thing was certain—he refused to never again experience the intimacy of being with Brenna. It wasn’t the sex, though that had been the most amazing experience of his life. It was the way he’d made her laugh, made her smile, made her complain and then cuddle. All because she’d felt safe, reassured by the strength of their emotional connection.

He would not steal that feeling from her. And he most definitely was not going to surrender her to another male who could give her what she needed. The idea made him want to break something.”
― Nalini Singh, quote from Caressed by Ice


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