“I wouldn't have left you like that. Not like she did to me." I swallow hard. "She always said I'd die without her and she left anyway."
"But you didn't die," He says.
"I did," I say. "I'm just waiting for the rest of me to catch up.”
― Courtney Summers, quote from This is Not a Test
“I woke up and the last piece of my heart disappeared. I opened my eyes and I felt it go.”
― Courtney Summers, quote from This is Not a Test
“The thing no one tells you about surviving, about the mere act of holding out, is how many hours are nothing because nothing happens. They also don’t tell you about how you can share your deepest secrets with someone, kiss them, and the next hour it’s like there’s nothing between you because not everything can mean something all the time or you’d be crushed under the weight of it.”
― Courtney Summers, quote from This is Not a Test
“Maybe the only way our story can end is varying degrees of sad.”
― Courtney Summers, quote from This is Not a Test
“I've been variations of hurt my whole life.”
― Courtney Summers, quote from This is Not a Test
“Waiting around to be saved is like waiting to die and I have done more of both than anyone else in the room.”
― Courtney Summers, quote from This is Not a Test
“I am so sad it makes me heavier than the sum of my parts.”
― Courtney Summers, quote from This is Not a Test
“I think there’s nothing left for me. I don’t think that for everyone else.”
“So what do they have that you don’t at this point?”
I press my lips together. I don’t want to talk about this anymore. I don’t want to talk about how everyone has something even if they don’t really have it anymore, that what they had makes them strong enough for this, to keep going.”
― Courtney Summers, quote from This is Not a Test
“We eat breakfast, lunch, and dinner to the soundtrack of our own impending death.”
― Courtney Summers, quote from This is Not a Test
“I don't know how I'm going to do this, move through the hours like someone who wants to still be breathing when I had so firmly made up my mind to stop.”
― Courtney Summers, quote from This is Not a Test
“I am so sad. I am so sad it makes me heavier than the sum of my parts. I shift, restless, but it doesn’t help. It’s like—time. All this time in here is on me, has its hooks in me. Maybe if I sleep more, I’ll wake up and I’ll feel different, but I can’t. The storm is really happening now and it makes the room feel emptier. Makes me feel emptier.”
― Courtney Summers, quote from This is Not a Test
“If life was fair, you wouldn't be here.”
― Courtney Summers, quote from This is Not a Test
“I’m sorry,” he tells me.
I sit down on the bed. He returns to the view of the street below. I follow his gaze and I see the infected walking slowly back and forth.
“It’s okay,” I say.
“Okay,” he says. He nods. “Good.”
He puts the gun under his chin and pulls the trigger.”
― Courtney Summers, quote from This is Not a Test
“This is not a test. Listen closely. This is not a test."
But I think she's wrong. I think this is a test.
It has to be.”
― Courtney Summers, quote from This is Not a Test
“I will see my father in every anger.”
― Courtney Summers, quote from This is Not a Test
“Is this what it's like to get close to other people--you do something insane together and then you have to share everything even if you don't really want to?”
― Courtney Summers, quote from This is Not a Test
“This must be what Dorothy felt like, I think. Maybe. If Dorothy was six scared teenagers and Oz was hell.”
― Courtney Summers, quote from This is Not a Test
“Sometimes you catch something specific like the screams and cries of people trying to hold on to each other before they're swallowed into other, bigger noises.
This is what it sound like when the world ends.”
― Courtney Summers, quote from This is Not a Test
“I move closer to the glass, as close as I can get to it, begging her, begging Lily, begging Grace, begging all of them to tell me what's left, to just tell me while the girl pushes against the window, turns her tiny hands into tiny fists, begging me for a taste of - life.
My life.
Lily disappears. Grace. They all leave, they're gone, they will never be here again. But the wright of what they've shown me is settling into my bones. I don't know if I will keep it, but just in this moment, however brief, I feel closer to it that I ever have before...
The dead girl presses her face against the glass. She wait for me to tell her what's next.”
― Courtney Summers, quote from This is Not a Test
“And that I miss her, that I need her, and this kind of missing, this kind of need, the kind of emptiness it leaves behind is worse than waking up one day and finding the whole world has collapsed in on itself, that I was over longer before it was.”
― Courtney Summers, quote from This is Not a Test
“I'm dying. I am dying. I have finally achieved what I set out to do. My heart is splitting open and I breathe in but no air gets into my lungs.”
― Courtney Summers, quote from This is Not a Test
“When this is over, society will need entertainment to get past it. We'll make movies about it, hundreds of movies, and in every one of them, we'll be the heroes and the love interests and best friends and winners and we'll watch these movies until we are so far removed from our own history, we'll forget how it really felt to be here.”
― Courtney Summers, quote from This is Not a Test
“You need to bury it," Cary tells me. "All of that's over. You have to be here now.”
― Courtney Summers, quote from This is Not a Test
“She always said I'd die without her and she left anyway."
"But you didn't." he says.
"I did," I say. "I'm just waiting for the rest of me to catch up.”
― Courtney Summers, quote from This is Not a Test
“He tells me its going to be okay until all the words blur together into a hum that makes me close my eyes and I start to go away and five, ten, fifteen minutes later, I'm aware of my hand sliding down his lap and then nothingness and then the gentle sensation of his index finger pressing into my open palm and then his hand is at my face, running his fingers across my skin and I'm so awake.”
― Courtney Summers, quote from This is Not a Test
“I hope I’m the ghost that belongs to her.”
― Courtney Summers, quote from This is Not a Test
“Cary's going to give them the rundown on everything we've managed to piece together about what happened before Baxter got in and the possibility that he's lying and then we'll all be suspicious. I stayed behind because I feel sick and tired and Cary said it's good if one of us stays because it will prevent Baxter from getting suspicious of his suspicion of him. Rhys said it might make him more suspicious. And then suspicious stopped seeming like a real word.”
― Courtney Summers, quote from This is Not a Test
“I wish I could break this window. Step through it. But I can't break this window. I can't even find some less dramatic way to die inside of this school, like hanging myself or slitting my wrists, because what would they do with my body? It might put everyone at risk. I won't let myself do that.
I'm not selfish like Lily.
I hate her. I hate her so much my heart tries to crawl out of my throat but it gets stuck there and beats crazily in the too narrow space. I bring my hands to my neck and try to massage it back down. I pres so heard against the skin, my eyes sting, and then I'm hurrying back down the stairs, back to the first floor. I think of Trace running laps, something he can control.”
― Courtney Summers, quote from This is Not a Test
“I think you're crazy good at this survival stuff, Cary."
His shoulders sag. He gives me a small, relieved smile and we start walking again, his step a little lighter than it was before. It feels strange to have that kind of power over someone.
"I mean, you're crazy good at it for a stoner who couldn't seem to get his shit together academically at all," I add.”
― Courtney Summers, quote from This is Not a Test
“I hold his gaze until the chaos outside breaks my concentration. Outside, where everything is falling, landing and breaking at once. Sometimes you catch something specific like the screams and cries of people trying to hold on to each other before they're swallowed into other, bigger noises. This is what it sounds like when the world ends.”
― Courtney Summers, quote from This is Not a Test
Courtney Summers
Born place: Canada
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“LEPRECHAUN GOLD; FLOOR PLANS FOR GINGERBREAD HOUSES; TALKING FISH; GHOSTS OF CHRISTMAS PAST, PRESENT, AND FUTURE; TIK-TOK MEN;”
― Michael Buckley, quote from The Unusual Suspects
“I had fallen in love with a perfect lie.”
― R.K. Lilley, quote from In Flight
“Men... performed better when they understood why they were being asked to carry out a task.”
― John Flanagan, quote from The Invaders
“For I have learned
To look on nature, not as in the hour
Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes
The still, sad music of humanity,
Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power
To chasten and subdue. And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man;
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things. Therefore am I still
A lover of the meadows and the woods,
And mountains; and of all that we behold
From this green earth; of all the mighty world
Of eye, and ear,—both what they half create,
And what perceive; well pleased to recognise
In nature and the language of the sense,
The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse,
The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul
Of all my moral being.”
― William Wordsworth, quote from Lyrical Ballads
“It's funny how once you start pretending, you realize how much everyone else is too.”
― Gayle Forman, quote from I Was Here
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