Quotes from This is Not a Test

“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

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“When my husband had an affair with someone else I watched his eyes glaze over when we ate dinner together and I heard him singing to himself without me, and when he tended the garden it was not for me.

He was courteous and polite; he enjoyed being at home, but in the fantasy of his home I was not the one who sat opposite him and laughed at his jokes. He didn't want to change anything; he liked his life. The only thing he wanted to change was me.

It would have been better if he had hated me, or if he had abused me, or if he had packed his new suitcases and left.

As it was he continued to put his arm round me and talk about being a new wall to replace the rotten fence that divided our garden from his vegetable patch. I knew he would never leave our house. He had worked for it.

Day by day I felt myself disappearing. For my husband I was no longer a reality, I was one of the things around him. I was the fence which needed to be replaced. I watched myself in the mirror and saw that I was mo longer vivid and exciting. I was worn and gray like an old sweater you can't throw out but won't put on.

He admitted he was in love with her, but he said he loved me.

Translated, that means, I want everything. Translated, that means, I don't want to hurt you yet. Translated, that means, I don't know what to do, give me time.

Why, why should I give you time? What time are you giving me? I am in a cell waiting to be called for execution.

I loved him and I was in love with him. I didn't use language to make a war-zone of my heart.

'You're so simple and good,' he said, brushing the hair from my face.

He meant, Your emotions are not complex like mine. My dilemma is poetic.

But there was no dilemma. He no longer wanted me, but he wanted our life

Eventually, when he had been away with her for a few days and returned restless and conciliatory, I decided not to wait in my cell any longer. I went to where he was sleeping in another room and I asked him to leave. Very patiently he asked me to remember that the house was his home, that he couldn't be expected to make himself homeless because he was in love.

'Medea did,' I said, 'and Romeo and Juliet and Cressida, and Ruth in the Bible.'

He asked me to shut up. He wasn't a hero.

'Then why should I be a heroine?'

He didn't answer, he plucked at the blanket.

I considered my choices.

I could stay and be unhappy and humiliated.

I could leave and be unhappy and dignified.

I could Beg him to touch me again.

I could live in hope and die of bitterness.

I took some things and left. It wasn't easy, it was my home too.

I hear he's replaced the back fence.”
― Jeanette Winterson, quote from Sexing the Cherry

“I see people, as they approach me, trying to make up their minds whether they'll 'say something about it' or not. I hate if they do, and if they don't.”
― C.S. Lewis, quote from A Grief Observed

“Some part of me knew he would show up, that if I stood in one place long enough he would find me, like you’re taught to do when you’re lost. But they never taught us what to do if both of you are lost, and you both end up in the same place, waiting.”
― Nick Flynn, quote from Another Bullshit Night in Suck City

“Was he still, somehow, watching over her?”
― Elizabeth Chandler, quote from Evercrossed

“I never quite got the hang of the getting drunk & fondling the thighs [of all the cumbersome young males] business... whether that makes me a gallant & proper gentleman, a cowardly wuss or an unadventurous prude, I cannot make out”
― Stephen Fry, quote from The Fry Chronicles

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