Quotes from To All the Boys I've Loved Before

“When someone's been gone a long time, at first you save up all the things you want to tell them. You try to keep track of everything in your head. But it's like trying to hold on to a fistful of sand: all the little bits slip out of your hands, and then you're just clutching air and grit.”
― Jenny Han, quote from To All the Boys I've Loved Before

“You'd rather make up a fantasy version of somebody in your head than be with a real person.”
― Jenny Han, quote from To All the Boys I've Loved Before

“Love is scary: it changes; it can go away. That's the part of the risk. I don't want to be scared anymore.”
― Jenny Han, quote from To All the Boys I've Loved Before

“Life doesn't have to be so planned. Just roll with it and let it happen.”
― Jenny Han, quote from To All the Boys I've Loved Before

“Do you know what it’s like to like someone so much you can’t stand it and know that they’ll never feel the same way?”
― Jenny Han, quote from To All the Boys I've Loved Before

“You only like guys you don't have a chance with, because you're scared.”
― Jenny Han, quote from To All the Boys I've Loved Before

“It's not like in the movies. It's better, because it's real.”
― Jenny Han, quote from To All the Boys I've Loved Before

“I don’t have to be so afraid of good-bye, because good-bye doesn’t have to be forever.”
― Jenny Han, quote from To All the Boys I've Loved Before

“I want to say yes, but I don't want to be with a boy whose heart belongs to somebody else. Just once, I want to be somebody else's first choice”
― Jenny Han, quote from To All the Boys I've Loved Before

“I didn't fall for you, you tripped me!”
― Jenny Han, quote from To All the Boys I've Loved Before

“Do you think there's a difference? Between belonging with and belonging to?”
― Jenny Han, quote from To All the Boys I've Loved Before

“When someone's been gone a long time, at first you save up all the things you want to tell them. You try to keep track of everything in your head. But it's like trying to hold on to a fistful of sand: all the little bits slip out of your hands, and then you're just clutching air and grit. That's why you can't save it all up like that.

Because by the time you finally see each other, you're catching up only on the big things, because it's too much bother to tell about the little things. But the little things are what make up life.”
― Jenny Han, quote from To All the Boys I've Loved Before

“I wonder what it's like to have that much power over a boy. I don't think I'd want it; it's a lot of responsibility to hold a person's heart in your hands.”
― Jenny Han, quote from To All the Boys I've Loved Before

“If love is like a possession, maybe my letter are like my exorcisms”
― Jenny Han, quote from To All the Boys I've Loved Before

“I delete the picture of him from my phone; I delete his number. I think that if I just delete him enough, it will be like none of it ever happened and my heart won't hurt so badly”
― Jenny Han, quote from To All the Boys I've Loved Before

“I'm always wondering about the what-ifs, about the road not taking.”
― Jenny Han, quote from To All the Boys I've Loved Before

“Smirking, he says, "Whatever spell you just tried to cast on me, it didn't work, so I think you need to go back to Hogwarts.”
― Jenny Han, quote from To All the Boys I've Loved Before

“If you were mine, I would never have broken up with you, not in a million years.”
― Jenny Han, quote from To All the Boys I've Loved Before

“It feels strange to have spen much time wishing for something, for someone and then one day, suddenly,to just stop”
― Jenny Han, quote from To All the Boys I've Loved Before

“Plenty of people are good-looking. That doesn't make them interesting or intriguing or cool.”
― Jenny Han, quote from To All the Boys I've Loved Before

“Seventeen's not so young. A hundred years ago people got married when they were practically our age."
"Yeah, that was before electricity and the Internet. A hundred years ago eighteen-year-old guys were out there fighting wars with bayonets and holding a man's life in their hands! They lived a lot of life by the time they were our age. What do kids our age know about love and life?”
― Jenny Han, quote from To All the Boys I've Loved Before

“Margot would say she belongs to herself. Kitty would say she belongs to no one. And I guess I would say I belong to my sisters and my dad, but that won’t always be true. To belong to someone—I didn’t know it, but now that I think about, it seems like that’s all I’ve ever wanted. To really be somebody’s, and to have them be mine.”
― Jenny Han, quote from To All the Boys I've Loved Before

“My letters are for when I don't want to be in love anymore. They're for good-bye. Because after I write in my letter, I'm not longer consumed by my all-consuming love...My letters set me free. Or at least they're supposed to.”
― Jenny Han, quote from To All the Boys I've Loved Before

“Love is scary: it changes; it can go away. That's part of the risk.”
― Jenny Han, quote from To All the Boys I've Loved Before

“How was I supposed to know what’s real and what’s not? It feels like I’m the only one who doesn’t know the difference.”
― Jenny Han, quote from To All the Boys I've Loved Before

“When I write, I hold nothing back. I write like he'll never read it. Because he never will. Every secret thought, every careful observation, everything I've saved up inside me, I put it all in the letter. When I'm done, I seal it, I address it, and then I put it in my teal hatbox.”
― Jenny Han, quote from To All the Boys I've Loved Before

“You've just gotta hold your head up and act like you don't give a shit”
― Jenny Han, quote from To All the Boys I've Loved Before

“It’s fun to think of the what-if. Scary, but fun. It’s like, I thought this door was closed before, but here it is open just the tiniest crack. What if?”
― Jenny Han, quote from To All the Boys I've Loved Before

“Josh, you break my heart. And you're a liar. Because you know me, you know me better than almost anybody, and you don't love me.”
― Jenny Han, quote from To All the Boys I've Loved Before

“Relationships are incredibly amorphous. They could get back together. They could stay friends. Who's to say what will happen in the future?”
― Jenny Han, quote from To All the Boys I've Loved Before

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Popular quotes

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“Celeste was practically talking to herself now because Stamford and the baby were in a world of their own. The baby's hands had reached the man's face and he was tapping every feature of it, doing everything that was necessary for the man to say the words the baby had come to expect in their brief history together. Stamford's mouth opened more and more. 'You here early this mornin,' Stamford Crow Blueberry would say to Ellwood Freemen that day some twenty years later in Richmond. Ellwood would be walking up the street with the reins of his horse in his hand, and Stamford would be walking with a baby resting on his shoulder, the newest member of the Richmond Home for Colored Orphans. Mother and father killed in a fire. Walking and singing to the baby in the morning seemed to calm the infant for the rest of the day. Ellwood Freemen would say, 'I have come to fulfill my duty, just as I promised, Mr. Blueberry. Is that to be one of my pupils?' Stamford would shake his hand, nodding. Ellwood said, 'You look as if you didn't believe I would keep my word.' 'Oh,' Stamford said, 'I whatn't worried. I know where your mama and papa live. I know where I could find them to tell em that their boy didn't keep his word.' Ellwood told him he had to tend to some business elsewhere in Richmond and would return shortly to settle in at the home for orphans. He got on his horse and rode slowly out to the main street, the street that would be named for Stamford Blueberry and his wife Delphie. Blueberry, with the new orphan on his shoulder, followed. He watched Ellwood take his time going off and Stamford that day would realize for the first time just how far they had come. He would have cried as he had that day after the ground opened up and took the dead crows, but he had in his arms a baby new to being an orphan. Stamford, it don't matter now, he told himself, watching Ellwood and the horse saunter away. It don't matter now. The day and the sun all about him told that was true. It mattered not how long he had wandered in the wilderness, how long they had kept him in chains, how long he had helped them and kept himself in his own chains; none of that mattered now. He patted the baby's back, turned around and went back to the Richmond Home for Colored Orphans. No, it did not matter. It mattered only that those kind of chains were gone and that he had crawled out into the clearing and was able to stand up on his hind legs and look around and appreciate the differences between then and now, even on the awful Richmond days when the now came dressed as the then. Behind him, as he walked back, was the very corner where more than a hundred years later they would put that first street sign - Stamford and Delphie Crow Blueberry Street.”
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“Nighttime is different. Things are otherwise when the world is black. Insecurities and hurts, anxieties and fears grow teeth at night.”
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“The infirmity of art was the candour of affection, the grossness of pedigree the refinement of sympathy; the ugliest object in fact as a general thing were the bravest, the tenderest mementoes, and, as such, figured in glass cases apart, worthy doubtless of the home but not worthy of the temple – dedicated to the grimacing, not to the clear-faced gods. She”
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“The gentle sound of her words became the shushing of my blood in my head, and I listened, hovering on the edge of consciousness, bathed in the oblivion of whatever drug they had given me.”
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