Quotes from This Song Will Save Your Life

“Sometimes people think they know you. They know a few facts about you, and they piece you together in a way that makes sense to them. And if you don't know yourself very well, you might even believe that they are right. But the truth is, that isn't you. That isn't you at all.”
― Leila Sales, quote from This Song Will Save Your Life

“That's the problem with life. You never get enough time to stare at your ceiling and try to figure out what's going on.”
― Leila Sales, quote from This Song Will Save Your Life

“You think it's so easy to change yourself. You think it's so easy, but it's not. True, things don't stay the same forever: couches are replaced, boys leave, you discover a song, your body becomes forever scarred. And with each of these moments you change and change again, your true self spinning, shifting positions-- but always at last it returns to you, like a dancer on the floor. Because throughout it all, you are still, always, you: beautiful and bruised, known and unknowable. And isn't that - just you - enough.”
― Leila Sales, quote from This Song Will Save Your Life

“People are who they are and, try as you might, you cannot make them be what you want them to be.”
― Leila Sales, quote from This Song Will Save Your Life

“I believe that a person's taste in music tells you a lot about them. In some cases, it tells you everything you need to know.”
― Leila Sales, quote from This Song Will Save Your Life

“I had this feeling suddenly. I get this feeling a lot, but I don’t know if there’s one word for it. It’s not nervous or sad or even lonely. It’s all of that, and then a bit more. The feeling is I don’t belong here. I don’t know how I got here, and I don’t know how long I can stay before everyone else realizes that I am an impostor. I am a fraud. I’ve gotten this feeling nearly everywhere I have ever been in my life. There’s nothing you can do about it except drink some water and hope that it subsides. Or you can leave.”
― Leila Sales, quote from This Song Will Save Your Life

“Don't you ever want to have just one thing that no one else knows about, so no one can ruin it for you?”
― Leila Sales, quote from This Song Will Save Your Life

“Sometimes, when you are worn down, day after day, relentlessly, with no reprieve for years piled on years, sometimes you lose everything but the ability to cry.”
― Leila Sales, quote from This Song Will Save Your Life

“Throughout it all, you are still, always, you: beautiful and bruised, known and unknowable.”
― Leila Sales, quote from This Song Will Save Your Life

“Sometimes you just have those days where everything goes wrong. But sometimes, and totally unexpectedly, something can go right.”
― Leila Sales, quote from This Song Will Save Your Life

“Sometimes you have to give up something you are to get to who you want to be.”
― Leila Sales, quote from This Song Will Save Your Life

“I didn’t know. I feel sometimes like…there are all these rules. Just to be a person. You know? You’re supposed to carry a shoulder bag, not a backpack. You’re supposed to wear headbands, or you’re not supposed to wear headbands. It’s okay to describe yourself as likeable, but it’s not okay to describe yourself as eloquent. You can sit in the front of the school bus, but you can’t sit in the middle. You’re not supposed to be with a boy, even when he wants you to. I didn’t know that. There are so many rules, and they don’t make any sense, and I just can’t learn them all”
― Leila Sales, quote from This Song Will Save Your Life

“I don't believe that anyone who is a legitimately interesting person can be popular as a teenager," Mel went on. "Or ever, maybe. Popularity rewards the uninteresting.”
― Leila Sales, quote from This Song Will Save Your Life

“Don't be special." That's what I would say to my younger self if I could pinpoint the moment when I went astray. But there was no one moment. I was always astray”
― Leila Sales, quote from This Song Will Save Your Life

“The thing about being an artist," Dad said, folding his newspaper and setting it down on the table, "is that there are always going to be people who want to stop you from doing your art. But this usually says more about them and their issues than it does about you and your art. Trust me.”
― Leila Sales, quote from This Song Will Save Your Life

“I do want to believe that there's some place in the world that's more mature than high school," Vicky said. "But I haven't found it yet.”
― Leila Sales, quote from This Song Will Save Your Life

“But you know better than anyone how the Internet sees everything and nothing, all at the same time.”
― Leila Sales, quote from This Song Will Save Your Life

“People have to create some sort of art so they have something to think about other than their shitty lives.”
― Leila Sales, quote from This Song Will Save Your Life

“You can't tell me my feelings are overwrought or absurd. You don't know. They are my feelings.”
― Leila Sales, quote from This Song Will Save Your Life

“But I also felt like an eggshell that had gotten a tiny crack. You can’t repair something like that. All you can do is hope that it sticks together, hope that the crack doesn't grow until all your insides come spilling right out.”
― Leila Sales, quote from This Song Will Save Your Life

“Which to you have?' Mel asked, blocking the entry with his body. 'Talent or issues?' I paused for a moment, thought about this. 'Both,' I said at last.”
― Leila Sales, quote from This Song Will Save Your Life

“Tonight the Internet seemed filled with versions of me, like a fun house filled with mirrors. Some of them made me look prettier, and some of them made me look uglier, and some of them chopped me right in half, but none of them were right.”
― Leila Sales, quote from This Song Will Save Your Life

“Anyone who said I believe in you obviously didn't know me very well.”
― Leila Sales, quote from This Song Will Save Your Life

“I was smiling like a crazy person because I has just made a hundred people dance, I had just made a hundred people scream, I had just made a hundred people happy. I, Elise, using my own power, had made people happy.”
― Leila Sales, quote from This Song Will Save Your Life

“I had never killed myself before, so I had no idea what would I want to listen to when it was too late for me to skip to the next song. Like, maybe when you're dying, you actually want to hear something really upbeat.”
― Leila Sales, quote from This Song Will Save Your Life

“I liked projects where I could take things apart and figure out exactly how they worked. The problem is, you can't do that with people.”
― Leila Sales, quote from This Song Will Save Your Life

“In Bio last year, I learned that blood is actually a dark maroon when it's inside your body. It's the exposure to oxygen that turns it bright red. And there must have been a lot of oxygen in my bathroom, because that blood was bright, bright red.”
― Leila Sales, quote from This Song Will Save Your Life

“Of course, as always, there is an arbitrary, invisible fence in place. You can't see it, but it will always keep you out. It will always encircle happiness and keep you out.”
― Leila Sales, quote from This Song Will Save Your Life

“This should have been a red flag, I realize in retrospect. Working really hard on anything is, by definition, not cool.”
― Leila Sales, quote from This Song Will Save Your Life

“It wasn't an effect of alcohol. It was more like we got drunk on the night.”
― Leila Sales, quote from This Song Will Save Your Life

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Popular quotes

“Man’s time is short on the earth, but we trees watch the years march past like days. The stars are motionless to you, but we watch and study the heavens as a dance,” the dryad said,”
― G. Norman Lippert, quote from James Potter and the Hall of Elders' Crossing

“He grinned a little as he thought it; for he had always liked that pause, that fearful pause, the moment before things changed.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, quote from The Other Wind

“Be always drunken.
Nothing else matters:
that is the only question.
If you would not feel
the horrible burden of Time
weighing on your shoulders
and crushing you to the earth,
be drunken continually.

Drunken with what?
With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you will.
But be drunken.

And if sometimes,
on the stairs of a palace,
or on the green side of a ditch,
or in the dreary solitude of your own room,
you should awaken
and the drunkenness be half or wholly slipped away from you,
ask of the wind,
or of the wave,
or of the star,
or of the bird,
or of the clock,
of whatever flies,
or sighs,
or rocks,
or sings,
or speaks,
ask what hour it is;
and the wind,
wave,
star,
bird,
clock will answer you:
"It is the hour to be drunken!”
― Charles Baudelaire, quote from Paris Spleen

“When Adolf Hitler heard of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, he slapped his hands together in glee and exclaimed, “Now it is impossible to lose the war. We now have an ally, Japan, who has never been vanquished in three thousand years.” Germany and Japan were threatening the world with massive land armies. But Hitler and Hirohito had never taken the measure of the man in the White House. A former assistant secretary of the navy, Franklin D. Roosevelt had his own ideas about the shape and size of the military juggernaut he would wield. FDR’s military experts told him that only huge American ground forces could meet the threat. But Roosevelt turned aside their requests to conscript tens of millions of Americans to fight a traditional war. The Dutchman would have no part in the mass WWI-type carnage of American boys on European or Asian killing fields. Billy Mitchell was gone, but Roosevelt remembered his words. Now, as Japan and Germany invested in yesterday, FDR invested in tomorrow. He slashed his military planners’ dreams of a vast 35-million-man force by more than half. He shrunk the dollars available for battle in the first and second dimensions and put his money on the third. When the commander in chief called for the production of four thousand airplanes per month, his advisers wondered if he meant per year. After all, the U.S. had produced only eight hundred airplanes just two years earlier. FDR was quick to correct them. The”
― James D. Bradley, quote from Flyboys: A True Story of Courage

“People only tell lies when there is something they are terribly frightened of losing.”
― Orhan Pamuk, quote from The Museum of Innocence

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