Laura Creedle · 352 pages
Rating: (1K votes)
“Yes,” Abelard said finally. “You are a fractured snowflake, a pattern repeated in infinite detail in a world full of salt crystals. You’re not broken—you’re perfect.” Perfect. Some tight, hard shell around my heart cracked open. I hadn’t even known I’d walled my heart away from this terrible world.”
― Laura Creedle, quote from The Love Letters of Abelard and Lily
“I couldn't stop thinking about him. He was an attractive nuisance, a shiny object.”
― Laura Creedle, quote from The Love Letters of Abelard and Lily
“My high numbers were test scores, the low numbers and zeros: homework. Because my brain stores random unimportant bits of information like the stellar news that the capital of Sri Lanka is Colombo, but it doesn’t seem to have room for the knowledge of what homework assignment is due. The brain wants what it wants.”
― Laura Creedle, quote from The Love Letters of Abelard and Lily
“It was killing me to think that there was a right and a wrong thing to do. Right for Abelard was wrong for me, and wrong for Abelard was right for me. And nothing made sense except that love is sacrifice and pain.”
― Laura Creedle, quote from The Love Letters of Abelard and Lily
“You're not going to work at McDonald's." Abelard resumed shaking his head from side to side. A tic--or maybe a world of no. I didn't know.”
― Laura Creedle, quote from The Love Letters of Abelard and Lily
“You never should have failed this project,"she whispered. "Total bullshit."
Mom never swears unless she's really angry. Guess she was that angry.
She picked up my Populations in Peril project and my paper and left. I watched her go, wondering why she wasn't this much of a badass all the time.”
― Laura Creedle, quote from The Love Letters of Abelard and Lily
“Abelard had on Wayfarer sunglasses, a dark blue windbreaker over a blue striped shirt, like he was on his way to a casual day of yachting. He looked cool and collected. The very opposite of me.”
― Laura Creedle, quote from The Love Letters of Abelard and Lily
“Anytime I got too happy, I could just assume something fragile and lovely was lying in wait, ready to shower my world in glass fragments and sticky lemon slices.”
― Laura Creedle, quote from The Love Letters of Abelard and Lily
“I love it when you speak computationally," I texted. "It makes me want to slap on a lab coat and get to work."
Abelard didn't text me back.
"Abelard?"
"I'm sorry," he texted. "I was distracted by the thought of you only wearing a white lab coat. I believe it is possible that you are the best girlfriend in the history of girlfriends."
"I do my best." My best. It's not often that I get to say these words.”
― Laura Creedle, quote from The Love Letters of Abelard and Lily
“I'd spent my entire life as a teacup with a jagged crack running down the side, an imperfect vessel threatening to spill my contents onto the table at any random moment. Tolerated but not adored. It didn't seem like it would be even possible to love me. Probabilistically unlikely at best. But for Abelard, the jagged crack was the interesting thing about me.”
― Laura Creedle, quote from The Love Letters of Abelard and Lily
“I was tired of concealing the truth from everyone. I was tired of keeping the loneliness and sadness inside my head.”
― Laura Creedle, quote from The Love Letters of Abelard and Lily
“Love is about being broken beyond repair in the eyes of the world and finding someone who thinks you're just fine, that you are special and precious because you understand how it feels to be broken and you have a real human heart.”
― Laura Creedle, quote from The Love Letters of Abelard and Lily
“Happy. It's the stupidest word in the English language. It's a sprinkles-on-your-ice-cream, My-Little-Pony kind of a word, and yet we are all expected to be happy about everything, including that which makes us miserable, like school.”
― Laura Creedle, quote from The Love Letters of Abelard and Lily
“Maybe a best friend is someone you run toward when you are running away from everything else.”
― Laura Creedle, quote from The Love Letters of Abelard and Lily
“I'm learning that my brain will invent catastrophic scenarios that bear absolutely no relationship to reality because, like Heloise, I am too much accustomed to misfortune to expect any happy turn.”
― Laura Creedle, quote from The Love Letters of Abelard and Lily
“My grandfather used to like the word 'mitigate,'" Harry said. "He liked the sound of it, and he used it whenever he could. When he was a very old man, he often got on the subject of dying. 'You cant talk your way out,' he'd often say, 'and you can't buy your way out, and you can't shoot your way out, and the only thing that mitigates the matter in the slightest is the fact that nobody else is going to escape. Nobody-no, not one.'"
"I know, I know," said Mr. Hewitt, "but what's the purpose of it?"
"You supported your wife, didn't you?" asked Harry. "You raised a family, didn't you? That's the purpose of it."
'That's no purpose," said Mr. Hewitt. "The same thing that's going to happen to me is going to happen to them."
"The generations have to keep coming along," said Harry. "That's all I know."
"You're put here, " said Mr. Hewitt, "and you're allowed to eat and draw breath and go back and forth a few short years, and about the time you get things in shape where you can sit down and enjoy them you wind up in a box in a hole in the ground, and as far as I can see, there's no purpose to it whatsoever.”
― Joseph Mitchell, quote from Up in the Old Hotel
“When I arrived at the graveyard, Silla and her brother were sitting together snacking on cookies. They both wore jeans and sweaters and had blood on their foreheads. Like a gruesome splotch jerking you out of an otherwise pastoral scene. That happened to be a cemetery. Okay, it was all pretty gruesome.”
― Tessa Gratton, quote from Blood Magic
“Hope, however, isn't all that's needed to achieve change. Hope is a hand extended, but two hands are required to be pulled out of this deep hole. The second hand was faith...”
― Dean Koontz, quote from One Door Away from Heaven
“It’s a disgusting mess we come through to be born, the sticky-wet of blood and afterbirth, mother wailing, child crying … the helpless soft spot at the top of its head pulsing, waiting to be kissed. Our parents and teachers say it’s a miracle, but it’s not. It’s going to happen no matter what, there’s no choice in the matter. To my mind, a miracle is something that could go one way or another. The fact that something happens, when by all rights it shouldn’t, is what makes us take notice, it’s what saints are made of, it takes the breath away. How a mother comes to love her child, her caring at all for this thing that’s made her heavy, lopsided and slow, this thing that made her wish she were dead … that’s the miracle.”
― Ami McKay, quote from The Birth House
“The man attempted to salute and Renius forced himself to smile, biting back his temper at the sloppy manners. He watched the fat figure run away into the buildings and wiped the first beads of sweat from his brow. Strange that such men as that should understand loyalty where so many others threw it aside at the first hint of freedom.”
― Conn Iggulden, quote from The Gates of Rome
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