Quotes from Stay

“I've heard that people stand in bad situations because a relationship like that gets turned up by degrees. It is said that a frog will jump out of a pot of boiling water. Place him in a pot and turn it up a little at a time, and he will stay until he is boiled to death. Us frogs understand this.”
― Deb Caletti, quote from Stay

“It's strange, isn't it, how the idea of belonging to someone can sound so great? It can be comforting, the way it makes things decided. We like the thought of being held, until it's too tight. We like that certainty, until it means there's no way out. And we like being his, until we realize we're not ours anymore.”
― Deb Caletti, quote from Stay

“Sometimes that´s all you need…, to know it´s not broken. To know you’re still whole and that you’ll heal.”
― Deb Caletti, quote from Stay

“You can forget that other people carry pieces of your own story around in their heads. I've always thought--put together all those random pieces form everyone who's ever known you from your parents to the guy who once sat next to you on a bus, and you'd probably see a fuller version of your life than you even did while living it.”
― Deb Caletti, quote from Stay

“We can get so wrapped up in our own misconceptions that we miss the simple beauty of the truth.”
― Deb Caletti, quote from Stay

“A person shows signs of clutching on too fast, of being needy, of not hearing the word "no," of jealousy, of guarding you and your freedom. But the signs can be so small they skitter right past you. Sometimes they dance past, looking satiny, something you should applaud. Someone's jealousy can make you feel good. Special. But it's not even about you. It's about a hand that is already gripping. It's about their need, circling around your throat”
― Deb Caletti, quote from Stay

“People can attach themselves to something--an idea, another person, a desire--with an impossibly strong grip, and in the case of restless ghosts, a grip stronger than death. Will is a powerful thing. Will--it's supposed to be a good treat, a more determined and persistent version of determination and persistence. But will and obsession--they sit right next to each other. They pretend to be strangers and all the while meet secretly at midnight." -”
― Deb Caletti, quote from Stay

“Funny the only two times we use the phrase "seeing someone" are when we are referring to being in a a relationship or getting psychological help.”
― Deb Caletti, quote from Stay

“My father said that love at first sight should send you running, if you know what's good for you. It's your dark pieces having instant recognition with their dark pieces, he says. You're an idiot if you think it means you've met your soul mate. So I was an idiot.”
― Deb Caletti, quote from Stay

“Just because it turned out bad, doesn’t mean it wasn’t meant.”
― Deb Caletti, quote from Stay

“You read all kinds of books and see all kinds of movies about the man who is obsessed and devoted, whose focus is a single solid beam, same as the lighthouse and that intense, too. It is Heathcliff with Catherine. It is a vampire with a passionate love stronger than death. We crave that kind of focus from someone else. We'd give anything to be that "loved." But that focus is not some soul-deep pinnacle of perfect devotion - it's only darkness and the tormented ghosts of darkness. It's strange, isn't it, to see a person's gaping emotional wounds, their gnawing needs, as our romance? We long for it, I don't know why, but when we have it, it is a knife at our throat on the banks of Greenlake. It is an unwanted power you'd do anything to be rid of. A power that becomes the ultimate powerlessness.”
― Deb Caletti, quote from Stay

“You have ordinary moments and ordinary moments and more ordinary moments, and then, suddenly, there is something monumental right there. You have past and future colliding in the present, your own personal Big Bang, and nothing will ever be the same.”
― Deb Caletti, quote from Stay

“An untold story has a weight that can submerge you, sure as a sunken ship at the bottom of the ocean.”
― Deb Caletti, quote from Stay

“One of the hardest tasks as a human being is knowing when to keep an open mind, and when not to.”
― Deb Caletti, quote from Stay

“The most true-love words are not the ones that grasp and hold and bind you, twisting you both up together in some black dance. No, they are ones that leave you free to stand alone on your own solid ground, leave him to do the same, a tender space between you.”
― Deb Caletti, quote from Stay

“Hurt is a weapon. Better weapon than most because it doesn't look like one.”
― Deb Caletti, quote from Stay

“I tried to read that book again before I went to sleep. I didn’t like that book, but I kept going for all the reasons a person hangs in with something that isn’t good-you feel bad about not giving it a chance, you´ve already come too far to give up now, you believe it´s going to get better. When you’re a person whose life has mostly brought good things, you believe in goodness. You believe that things will work out. Even the worst things will work out. You believe in a happy ending.
But you are naïve. The mostly good in your life has made you that way. You´ve spent so much time seeing the bright side that you don’t even believe the other side exists. You are wrong about that.
I closed that book. I wouldn’t open it again, I vowed. It was time to learn something.”
― Deb Caletti, quote from Stay

“We should have the right to have someone leave when we want, to only allow those in who we want in. But the truth is, people can force their way into your life whenever they choose. If they want to remind you forevermore that they exist, they will. They can reappear in a card or call or a "chance" meeting, they can remember your birthday or the day you met with some innocuous small note. No matter how little they matter in your new life, they can insist on being seen and recognized and remembered.”
― Deb Caletti, quote from Stay

“It was all the things you could never understand and could never possess that made you ache.”
― Deb Caletti, quote from Stay

“If fate is a shape-shifter, then loves is too. It can be, anyway, in its most dangerous form. It´s your best day and then your worst. It´s your most hope and then you most despair. Lightness, darkness, it can swing between extremes at lightning speed- a boat upon the water on the most dangerous day, and then the clouds crawl in and the sky turns black and the sea rages and the boat is lost.”
― Deb Caletti, quote from Stay

“Breaking up could sit in front of you for a while. It was a ring of fire you had to at last decide to run through. You finally got tired of standing there, looking at it, feeling the heat, tired enough to finally just let go. Getting burned at last seemed better than the waiting to get burned.”
― Deb Caletti, quote from Stay

“A new person in your life gives the rest of you a chance to be new, too. Your life can be whatever you want it to, from there on out. I leaned in and kissed and that is who I was to him, not shy, but bold. Not inhibited, but brave. I was that to him and so I kept being that. It was what I thought he wanted and what he was attracted to, and yet it was this, this exact thing I wasn't even really, that made him the most insecure.”
― Deb Caletti, quote from Stay

“We see a promise as a personal law, and we see the people who break them as private-life criminals. We think it automatically, one of those truths that just is to us: breaking a promise is a bad, bad thing. A promise can be as buoyant as whispered words or solemn as a marriage vow, but we view it as something pure and untouchable when it should never be either of those things. If a promise is a personal law, a contract, then it ought to be layered with fine print, rules and conditions, promises within those promises, and whether we like it or not, it ought to be something we can snatch back, that we should snatch back, if those rules are violated.”
― Deb Caletti, quote from Stay

“Our memories and the events of our lives are untidy things. We wish that we could file them away and shut the door, or we wish the opposite - that they would stay with us forever. You want to banish the remembrance of a tight hold on your ankle, a rope under a bed, the amber-colored medicine bottles of your father, the door your mother slams after a night of too much wine and jealousy. You want to keep close to you always that first sweet kiss, a maple leaf, that growing sense of yourself; you want to hold the sight of your dying father on that last boat trip, the calm you remember as your mother held you. Her voice.”
― Deb Caletti, quote from Stay

“I don’t know why we insist on pain when pain is so often easy to eliminate. It’s funny the ways we try to punish ourselves when we feel we’ve committed some crime.”
― Deb Caletti, quote from Stay

“They never told you that stranger might be someone you knew.”
― Deb Caletti, quote from Stay

“The way two people can end up in the same place, find each other in a crowd, and change their lives and the lives of the people around them forever... It makes you believe in fate. And fate gives love some authority. Like it's been stamped with approval from above, if you believe in above. A godly green light. Some destined significance.”
― Deb Caletti, quote from Stay

“We're as good at talking ourselves out of fear as into it, aren't we? Maybe better.”
― Deb Caletti, quote from Stay

“You could care enough to keep a secret, but you could care enough to tell one, too.”
― Deb Caletti, quote from Stay

“Fate is a shape-shifter. It is the kindest and most generous entity imaginable, laying out more goodness than a person deserves, and then it shrinks and curls and forms into something grotesque. You think something is one thing, but then it´s another.”
― Deb Caletti, quote from Stay

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Popular quotes

“It doesn't matter who you are or what you like so long as somebody loves you”
― Roald Dahl, quote from The Witches

“I had hardly expected so dolichocephalic a skull or such well-marked supra-orbital development. Would you have any objection to my running my finger along your parietal fissure? A cast of your skull, sir, until the original is available, would be an ornament to any anthropological museum. It is not my intention to be fulsome, but I confess that I covet your skull.”
― Arthur Conan Doyle, quote from The Hound of the Baskervilles

“You were already in a prison. You've been in a prison all your life. Happiness is a prison, Evey. Happiness is the most insidious prison of all. Your lover lived in the penitentiary that we are all born into, and was forced to rake the dregs of that world for his living. He knew affection and tenderness but only briefly. Eventually, one of the other inmates stabbed him with a cutlass and he drowned upon his own blood. Is that it, Evey? Is that the happiness worth more than freedom? It's not an uncommon story, Evey. Many convicts meet with miserable ends. Your mother. Your father. Your lover. One by one, taken out behind the chemical sheds... and shot. All convicts, hunched and deformed by the smallness of their cells, the weight of their chains, the unfairness of their sentences. I didn't put you in a prison, Evey. I just showed you the bars.'
'You're wrong! It's just life, that's all! It's just how life is. It's what we've got to put up with. It's all we've got. What gives you the right to decide it's not good enough?'
'You're in a prison, Evey. You were born in a prison. You've been in a prison so long, you no longer believe there's a world outside. That's because you're afraid, Evey. You're afraid because you can feel freedom closing in upon you. You're afraid because freedom is terrifying. Don't back away from it, Evey. Part of you understands the truth even as part pretends not to. You were in a cell, Evey. They offered you a choice between the death of your principles and the death of your body. You said you'd rather die. You faced the fear of your own death and you were calm and still. The door of the cage is open, Evey. All that you feel is the wind from outside.”
― Alan Moore, quote from V for Vendetta

“There was a loud scraping noise as five chairs slid backward. The men rose as a unit. And started coming for her. She looked to the faces of the two she knew, but their grave expressions weren't encouraging. And then the knives came out. With a metallic whoosh, five black daggers were unsheathed. She backed up frantically, hands in front of herself. She slammed into a wall and was about to scream for Wrath when the men dropped down on bended knees in a circle around her. In a single movement, as if they'd been choreographed, they buried the daggers into the floor at her feet and bowed their heads. The great whoomp of sound as steel met wood seemed both a pledge and a battle cry. The handles of the knives vibrated. The rap music continued to pound. They seemed to be waiting for some kind of response from her.
"Umm. Thank you," she said.
The men's heads lifted. Etched into the harsh planes of their faces was total reverence. Even the scarred one had a respectful expression. And then Wrath came in with a squeeze bottle of Hershey's syrup.
"Bacon's on the way." He smiled. "Hey, they like you."
"And thank God for that," she murmured, looking down at the daggers.”
― J.R. Ward, quote from Dark Lover

“Behold!" Percy shouted. "The god's chosen beverage. Tremble before the horror of Diet Coke!”
― Rick Riordan, quote from The Mark of Athena

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BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.

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