“It was strange how words meant something when they came out of your mouth. Inside your head they were safe and silent, but once they were outside, people grabbed hold of them.”
― Jenny Downham, quote from You Against Me
“Sometimes if you want something badly enough, you can make it happen. If you miss someone so desperately that it wrecks your insides, you say their name over and over until you conjure then. It's called sympathetic magic and you just have to believe in it to make it work.”
― Jenny Downham, quote from You Against Me
“If you want a girl to like you, you have to listen like a woman and love like a man.”
― Jenny Downham, quote from You Against Me
“Statement: A girl and a boy jump into a river. The boy swims over to the girl and says, "God, it's cold."
Question: What's the probability they will kiss?”
― Jenny Downham, quote from You Against Me
“Do you want this to be a love story?”
― Jenny Downham, quote from You Against Me
“I like you," he said.
He made it sound as if she was bound to disagree with him. She nodded. His face said he was telling her something very important.
He said, "I mean it. Whatever happens, you have to believe that.”
― Jenny Downham, quote from You Against Me
“Is this how it is for everyone?' she whispered.
'No.'
'How do you know?'
'I just do. I've never felt this with anyone before.'
'Serious?'
'Serious. That isn't a line.'
'Kiss me,' she said.
He did. Everywhere.”
― Jenny Downham, quote from You Against Me
“Was this love? Because it hurt. It was like a bit of glass stuck somewhere important - his heart or his head, and it was throbbing.”
― Jenny Downham, quote from You Against Me
“When I first saw Ellie, I knew it was her-- she was my fantasy. I didn't want it to be true, but every time I met her it was obvious, and the funny thing was that she was better than the fantasy, like I got more stuff than I'd imagined.”
― Jenny Downham, quote from You Against Me
“Parents don’t know their children at all.
No one knows anyone, in fact.”
― Jenny Downham, quote from You Against Me
“The last few weeks, it was as if someone had taken his life to pieces and let him see the way it worked.”
― Jenny Downham, quote from You Against Me
“Funny how when life was that simple, you never really realized how lucky you were.”
― Jenny Downham, quote from You Against Me
“You changed the rules of the universe when you fell in love with the enemy.”
― Jenny Downham, quote from You Against Me
“Help me, Mikey, she wanted to say. I’m afraid. More afraid than you’d ever believe.’ And he’d take her hand and they’d fly across the rooftops and up into space and sit on some planet and watch a double sunrise or maybe a star being born or some other event that no human had ever seen, her head on his shoulder, his arm around her. And she’d tell him everything.”
― Jenny Downham, quote from You Against Me
“She needed food. Diets didn't count in a crisis.”
― Jenny Downham, quote from You Against Me
“Every breath, every heartbeat, was one less until maybe things stopped hurting this much.”
― Jenny Downham, quote from You Against Me
“We'll kill him on the green with a five iron.”
― Jenny Downham, quote from You Against Me
“Alchemy, Dex called it, which was something to do with magic if you were French.”
― Jenny Downham, quote from You Against Me
“When he thought about her, he remembered her at the cottage, her eyes fiery, daring to love him. But standing here in front of him , she looked defeated and sad.”
― Jenny Downham, quote from You Against Me
“She wishes she was old. She'd swap her life to be in a life that was nearly over, so long as she didn't have to be here.”
― Jenny Downham, quote from You Against Me
“Why do I feel like you're not on my side anymore? Please don't give up on me.”
― Jenny Downham, quote from You Against Me
Jenny Downham
Born place: London, The United Kingdom
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“The girl is infectious human waste, and she's confused and afraid to commit to the wrong thing and so she won't commit to anything.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, quote from Fight Club
“You make the decision: Whom did God punish?”
― Louis Sachar, quote from Holes
“It is the oldest ironies that are still the most satisfying: man, when preparing for bloody war, will orate loudly and most eloquently in the name of peace.”
― Alan Moore, quote from Watchmen
“The more a thing is perfect, the more it feels pleasure and pain.”
― Dante Alighieri, quote from The Divine Comedy
“There was a girl, and her uncle sold her. Put like that it seems so simple.
No man, proclaimed Donne, is an island, and he was wrong. If we were not islands, we would be lost, drowned in each other's tragedies. We are insulated (a word that means, literally, remember, made into an island) from the tragedy of others, by our island nature and by the repetitive shape and form of the stories. The shape does not change: there was a human being who was born, lived and then by some means or other, died. There. You may fill in the details from your own experience. As unoriginal as any other tale, as unique as any other life. Lives are snowflakes- forming patterns we have seen before, as like one another as peas in a pod (and have you ever looked at peas in a pod? I mean, really looked at them? There's not a chance you'll mistake one for another, after a minute's close inspection) but still unique.
Without individuals we see only numbers, a thousand dead, a hundred thousand dead, "casualties may rise to a million." With individual stories, the statistics become people- but even that is a lie, for the people continue to suffer in numbers that themselves are numbing and meaningless. Look, see the child's swollen, swollen belly and the flies that crawl at the corners of his eyes, this skeletal limbs: will it make it easier for you to know his name, his age, his dreams, his fears? To see him from the inside? And if it does, are we not doing a disservice to his sister, who lies in the searing dust beside him, a distorted distended caricature of a human child? And there, if we feel for them, are they now more important to us than a thousand other children touched by the same famine, a thousand other young lives who will soon be food for the flies' own myriad squirming children?
We draw our lines around these moments of pain, remain upon our islands, and they cannot hurt us. They are covered with a smooth, safe, nacreous layer to let them slip, pearllike, from our souls without real pain.
Fiction allows us to slide into these other heads, these other places, and look out through other eyes. And then in the tale we stop before we die, or we die vicariously and unharmed, and in the world beyond the tale we turn the page or close the book, and we resume our lives.
A life that is, like any other, unlike any other.
And the simple truth is this: There was a girl, and her uncle sold her.”
― Neil Gaiman, quote from American Gods
Brother's Keeper
The Untouchables
Love's Suicide
Saga, Vol. 3
Cinder & Ella
The End of the WorldBookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.
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