Quotes from We Were Liars

“Be a little kinder than you have to.”
― E. Lockhart, quote from We Were Liars

“Do not accept an evil you can change.”
― E. Lockhart, quote from We Were Liars

“Always do what you're afraid to do.”
― E. Lockhart, quote from We Were Liars

“There is not even a Scrabble word for how bad I feel.”
― E. Lockhart, quote from We Were Liars

“We are liars. We are beautiful and privileged. We are cracked and broken.”
― E. Lockhart, quote from We Were Liars

“She is sugar, curiosity, and rain.”
― E. Lockhart, quote from We Were Liars

“What if we could stop being different colors, different backgrounds, and just be in love?”
― E. Lockhart, quote from We Were Liars

“He was contemplation and enthusiasm. Ambition and strong coffee. I could have looked at him forever.”
― E. Lockhart, quote from We Were Liars

“The universe is seeming really huge right now. I need something to hold on to.”
― E. Lockhart, quote from We Were Liars

“Silence is a protective coating over pain.”
― E. Lockhart, quote from We Were Liars

“If you want to live where people are not afraid of mice, you must give up living in palaces.”
― E. Lockhart, quote from We Were Liars

“Someone once wrote that a novel should deliver a series of small astonishments. I get the same thing spending an hour with you.”
― E. Lockhart, quote from We Were Liars

“Here I am frozen, when I deserve to burn.”
― E. Lockhart, quote from We Were Liars

“I suffer migraines. I do not suffer fools.”
― E. Lockhart, quote from We Were Liars

“Better than chocolate, being with you last night. Silly me, I thought that nothing was better than chocolate.”
― E. Lockhart, quote from We Were Liars

“Always do what you're afraid to do.
...
I will prove myself strong when they think I am sick.
I will prove myself brave when they think I am weak.”
― E. Lockhart, quote from We Were Liars

“Be sad, be sorry-but don't shoulder it.”
― E. Lockhart, quote from We Were Liars

“He was a person who couldn't fake a smile but smiled often.”
― E. Lockhart, quote from We Were Liars

“The island is ours. Here, in some way, we are young forever.”
― E. Lockhart, quote from We Were Liars

“See the world as it is, not as you wish it would be”
― E. Lockhart, quote from We Were Liars

“Then he pulled out a handgun and shot me in the chest. I was standing on the lawn and I fell. The bullet hole opened wide and my heart rolled out of my rib cage and down into a flower bed. Blood gushed rhythmically from my open wound,
then from my eyes,
my ears,
my mouth.
It tasted like salt and failure. The bright red shame of being unloved soaked the grass in front of our house, the bricks of the path, the steps of the porch. My heart spasmed among the peonies like a trout.”
― E. Lockhart, quote from We Were Liars

“One day, she ventured to the palace library and was delighted to find what good company books could be.”
― E. Lockhart, quote from We Were Liars

“They know that tragedy is not glamorous. They know it doesn't play out in life as it does on a stage or between the pages of a book. It is neither a punishment meted out nor a lesson conferred. Its horrors are not attributable to one single person. Tragedy is ugly and tangled, stupid and confusing.”
― E. Lockhart, quote from We Were Liars

“I'll be fine, they tell me. I won't die. It'll just hurt a lot.”
― E. Lockhart, quote from We Were Liars

“She confused being spartan with being charitable, and gave away her possessions without truly doing good with them.
She confused being sick with being brave, and suffered agonies while imagining she merited praise for it.
She confused wit with intelligence, and made people laugh rather than lightening their hearts or making them think.”
― E. Lockhart, quote from We Were Liars

“I love him, but I am not sure I like him.”
― E. Lockhart, quote from We Were Liars

“But the thing that makes me really messed up is the contradiction: when I'm not hating myself, I feel righteous and victmized. Like the world is so unfair.”
― E. Lockhart, quote from We Were Liars

“He looked at you like you were the brightest planet in the galaxy.”
― E. Lockhart, quote from We Were Liars

“Never take a seat in the back of the room. Winners sit up front.”
― E. Lockhart, quote from We Were Liars

“ONCE UPON A time, there was a king who had three beautiful daughters. He loved each of them dearly. One day, when the young ladies were of age to be married, a terrible, three-headed dragon laid siege to the kingdom, burning villages with fiery breath. It spoiled crops and burned churches. It killed babies, old people, and everyone in between.

The king promised a princess’s hand in marriage to whoever slayed the dragon. Heroes and warriors came in suits of armor, riding brave horses and bearing swords and arrows.

One by one, these men were slaughtered and eaten.

Finally the king reasoned that a maiden might melt the dragon’s heart and succeed where warriors had failed. He sent his eldest daughter to beg the dragon for mercy, but the dragon listened to not a word of her pleas. It swallowed her whole.

Then the king sent his second daughter to beg the dragon for mercy, but the dragon did the same. Swallowed her before she could get a word out.

The king then sent his youngest daughter to beg the dragon for mercy, and she was so lovely and clever that he was sure she would succeed where the others had perished.

No indeed. The dragon simply ate her.

The king was left aching with regret. He was now alone in the world.

Now, let me ask you this. Who killed the girls?

The dragon? Or their father?”
― E. Lockhart, quote from We Were Liars

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Popular quotes

“Say you've just read Faulkner's 'Barn Burning'. Like the son in the story, you've sensed the faults in your father's character. Thinking about them makes you uncomfortable, left alone you'd probably close the book and move on to other thoughts. But instead you are taken in hand by a tall, brooding man with a distinguished limp who involves you and a roomful of other boys in the consideration of what it means to be a son. The loyalty that is your duty and your worth and your problem. The goodness of loyalty and its difficulties and snares, how loyalty might also become betrayal - of the self and the world outside the circle of blood.

You've never had this conversation before, not with anyone. And even as its happening you understand that just as your father's troubles with the world - emotional frailty, self-doubt, incomplete honesty - will not lead him to set it on fire, your own loyalty will never be the stuff of tragedy. You will not turn bravely and painfully from your father, as the boy in the story does, but foresake him, without regret. And as you accept that separation, it seems to happen; your father's sad, fleshy face grows vague, and you blink it away and look up to where your teachers leans against his desk, one hand in a coat pocket, the other rubbing his bum knee as he listens desolately to the clever bore behind you saying something about bird imagery.”
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“The hardest lesson any of us must learn is there’s only so much we can do,” she informed him, her voice lemon-tart. “We run into it headfirst all the time, knowing what we can do, what we can’t, how much we can do. We think of magic as this promise that we will fix anything that comes our way, Keth. We can’t.”
― Tamora Pierce, quote from Shatterglass

“Still in the black hemisphere the stars blazed and slowly wheeled; beneath them, Will felt so infinitesimally small that it seemed impossible he should even exist. Immensity pressed in on him, terrifying, threatening--and then, in a swift flash of movement like a dance, like the glint of a leaping fish, came a flick of brightness in the sky from a shooting star... He heard Bran give a small chirrup of delight, a spark struck from the same bright sudden joy that filled his own being.”
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