Quotes from The Sea of Tranquility

“People like to say love is unconditional, but it's not, and even if it was unconditional, it's still never free. There's always an expectation attached. They always want something in return. Like they want you to be happy or whatever and that makes you automatically responsible for their happiness because they won't be happy unless you are ... I just don't want that responsibility.”
― Katja Millay, quote from The Sea of Tranquility

“Daylight won’t protect you from anything. Bad things happen all the time; they don’t wait until after dinner”
― Katja Millay, quote from The Sea of Tranquility

“There are so many things that can break you if there's nothing to hold you together.”
― Katja Millay, quote from The Sea of Tranquility

“I wished my mother was here tonight, which is stupid, because it’s an impossible wish.” He shrugs and turns to me, drowning the smile that cracks me every time.
“It’s not stupid to want to see her again.”
“It wasn’t so much that I wanted to see her again,” he says, looking at me with the depth of more than seventeen years in his eyes. “I wanted her to see you.”
― Katja Millay, quote from The Sea of Tranquility

“I am pressed so hard against the earth by the weight of reality that some days I wonder how I am still able to lift my feet to walk.”
― Katja Millay, quote from The Sea of Tranquility

“I know at that moment what he's given me and it isn't a chair. It's an invitation, a welcome, the knowledge that I am accepted here. He hasn't given me a place to sit. He's given me a place to belong.”
― Katja Millay, quote from The Sea of Tranquility

“I live in a world without magic or miracles. A place where there are no clairvoyants or shapeshifters, no angels or superhuman boys to save you. A place where people die and music disintegrates and things suck.”
― Katja Millay, quote from The Sea of Tranquility

“Maybe one day you'll come back. Maybe you never will and that'll suck, but you can't keep doing this. The blame and the self-loathing and the bullshit. I can't watch that. It makes me hate you for hating yourself. I don't want to lose you. But I'd rather lose you if it means you'll be happy. I think if you come back with me today, you'll never be okay. And I'll never be okay if you aren't. I need to know that there's a way for people like us to end up okay. I need to know that there even is such a thing as okay, maybe even good, and it's out there and we just haven't found it yet. There's got to be a happier ending than this, here. There's got to be a better story. Because we deserve one. You deserve one. Even if it doesn't end with you coming back to me.”
― Katja Millay, quote from The Sea of Tranquility

“We're like mysteries to one another. Maybe if I can solve him and he can solve me, we can explain each other. Maybe that's what I need. Someone to explain me.”
― Katja Millay, quote from The Sea of Tranquility

“Emilia," he says, and when he does, it warms me to my soul. "Every day you save me.”
― Katja Millay, quote from The Sea of Tranquility

“Just so you know,” I inform him, “one day, I’m going to get tired of sharing your affection with that coffee table and I’m going to make you choose.” “Just so you know,” he mimics me, “I would chop that table up and use it for firewood before I would ever choose anything over you.”
― Katja Millay, quote from The Sea of Tranquility

“And if my Sea od Tranquility were real, it would be this place, here, with him.
I don't say anything right away, because I just want one minute to look at him before I give him my last secret.
And then I tell him.
"Your garage.”
― Katja Millay, quote from The Sea of Tranquility

“Do real boys actually call girls baby? I don't have enough experience to know. I do know that if a guy ever called me baby, I'd probably laugh in his face. Or choke him.”
― Katja Millay, quote from The Sea of Tranquility

“People who go around advertising their birthdays are douchebags. It's a fact. You can look it up on Wikipedia.”
― Katja Millay, quote from The Sea of Tranquility

“When you look at her what do you feel?... Joy, fear, frustration, longing, friendship, anger, need, despair, love, lust?"
"Yes."
"Yes, what?"
"All of it.”
― Katja Millay, quote from The Sea of Tranquility

“The world should be full of Josh Bennetts. But it’s not. I had the only one. And I threw him away.”
― Katja Millay, quote from The Sea of Tranquility

“When I look at her now, I think, for just one second, that God doesn't hate me so much after all.”
― Katja Millay, quote from The Sea of Tranquility

“What? Sunshine fits you. It's bright and warm and happy. Just. Like. You.”
― Katja Millay, quote from The Sea of Tranquility

“I haven’t started counting yet. I wonder if it’s just me or if it’s like that for everybody; that every time someone dies you start counting how much time has passed since they’ve been gone. First you count it in minutes, then in hours. You count in days, then weeks, then months. Then one day you realize that you aren’t counting anymore, and you don’t even know when you stopped. That’s the moment they’re gone.”
― Katja Millay, quote from The Sea of Tranquility

“And maybe I'm a liar and I do need it, because being kissed by Josh Bennet is kind of like being saved. It's a promise and a memory of the future and a book of better stories.”
― Katja Millay, quote from The Sea of Tranquility

“Josh isn’t in love with me and I’m not in love with him.”
“Sell it to someone who’s buying, Sunshine. Have you seen the way he looks at you?” I’ve seen the way he looks at me but I don’t know what it means. “Like you’re a seventeenth-century, hand-carved table in mint condition.”
― Katja Millay, quote from The Sea of Tranquility

“You know I meant it. I am human. And male. And not remotely blind. Do you want me to say it again? You are distractingly, even if-that-is-not-a-real-word pretty. You are so pretty that I bullied Clay Whitaker into drawing me a picture of you so I could look at you when you aren't around. You are so pretty that one of these days I'm going to lose a finger in my garage because I can't concentrate with you so close to me. You are so pretty that I wish you weren't so I wouldn't want to hit every guy at school who looks at you, especially my best friend.”
― Katja Millay, quote from The Sea of Tranquility

“Call me Sunshine again, and I will murder you, cocksucker.”
― Katja Millay, quote from The Sea of Tranquility

“I don't know how to say it - after all this time, I'm not even sure that I can - but I have to break her last rule, because if she knows nothing else, I need her to know this one thing.
'I love you, Sunshine,' I tell her, before I lose my nerve. 'And I don't give a shit whether you want me to or not.”
― Katja Millay, quote from The Sea of Tranquility

“Nothing is perfect. It's not even good yet. But maybe.”
― Katja Millay, quote from The Sea of Tranquility

“I’m going to walk over to you,” I say, taking one step at a time in her direction like I’m talking down a jumper. “I’m going to put my arms around you and I’m going to hold you,” I pause before taking the last step, “and you’re going to let me.”
― Katja Millay, quote from The Sea of Tranquility

“It’s about the dream of second chances,” he says finally. He hasn’t raised his eyes from the paper on his desk and I feel him looking at me without looking when he uses his grandfather’s words. “The narrator doesn’t respect the beauty of life and the world around her, so it crushes her into the ground and once she’s dead, she realizes everything she took for granted and didn’t see right in front of her while she was alive. She’s begging for another chance to live again so she can appreciate it this time.”
“And does she get that chance?” she asks Josh while I desperately focus on the poster of literary terms on the wall and wait for absolution. When it comes, I barely hear it.
“She does.”
― Katja Millay, quote from The Sea of Tranquility

“He's kissing me. And when he does, part of me is lost. But it's the part that's twisted and mangled and wrong, and for just that moment, with his hands in my hair and his lips on my mouth, I can pretend that it never existed.”
― Katja Millay, quote from The Sea of Tranquility

“Good Morning, Sunshine!" Josh F**king Bennett. By now, I'm pretty sure that if I were to find his birth certificate that is exactly what it would say.”
― Katja Millay, quote from The Sea of Tranquility

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Popular quotes

“If there is something in nature you don't understand, odds are it makes sense in a deeper way that is beyond your understanding. So there is a logic to natural things that is much superior to our own. Just as there is a dichotomy in law: 'innocent until proven guilty' as opposed to 'guilty until proven innocent', let me express my rule as follows: what Mother Nature does is rigorous until proven otherwise; what humans and science do is flawed until proven otherwise.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, quote from Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder

“Then Er Lang was looking at me ruefully. “You have taken at least fifty years of my life!”
I was stricken. “Take it back!”
“I can’t. But fortunately, my life span is many times yours.”
“How long can a dragon live?”
“A thousand years, if he is lucky. Not all of us are, of course.” He raised an eyebrow.
“I’m sorry.” I couldn’t look him in the eye. Instead, my gaze was drawn to the strong line of his throat. If he had given me blood, I would surely have killed him. But Er Lang was struggling to sit up.
“I should have stopped you sooner. Though I now understand why men succumb to ghosts.” He spoke lightly, but my ears blazed with mortification.
“You were the one who put your tongue in my mouth!” I blurted out, regretting it instantly. To talk about other people’s tongues was the worst, revealing the depths of my inexperience. And yet, the memory of his made me shiver and burn, as though I had a fever. It hadn’t been like this with Tian Bai; it was easy to understand where I stood with him. But he had been courting me, whereas Er Lang was an entirely different commodity. We did not have that sort of relationship, I reminded myself.
But he merely gave me a wry glance. “I was a little carried away.”
“Thank you,” I said at last. I realized it was the first time I had thanked him formally.”
― Yangsze Choo, quote from The Ghost Bride

“Do you love him?”
I jumped out of my skin. She was standing right beside me. “Who?”
Her eyes widened.
“Seth?” I peered over my shoulder at his retreating back. “Um, we’ve been going together for a long time. A year.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
I couldn’t look at her. Couldn’t risk her seeing through me, reading me.
“Do you hear bells?” she asked.
I had to smile at that. “Bells?”
“You know, bells. Music, fireworks.” She wiggled her eyebrows.
I let out a short laugh. It sounded strangled, same way I felt. “Only in my dreams.”
“Oh, yeah?” She arched an eyebrow.
Why did I say that? God.
Cece said softly, “Maybe you should listen to your dreams.”
My stomach suffered a major eruption.
She pushed off the locker she’d been balancing against with the sole of her shoe and said, “Think about it.”
Like I haven’t been. “Do you think about it?” I asked at her back.
She stopped and turned around. “I don’t have to. I know.” (Chapter13)”
― Julie Anne Peters, quote from Keeping You a Secret

“You make everything all right for me, Anita. You make me feel like a human being instead of a monster.’
'And you love all of me, Micah, every last hard-boiled, ruthless bit of me. You make it okay that sometimes I am the monster.”
― Laurell K. Hamilton, quote from Micah

“You gotta pay your dues to sing the blues.”
― Carol Plum-Ucci, quote from What Happened to Lani Garver

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