Today I decided I was going to do a book review in just quotes. This is one of my all time favorite books. It has so many amazing lines in it that it felt like when I finished the book, half of it was highlighted. And I feel like the quotes will do the book way more justice then any review I could ever write. If you haven't read this book yet, you need to rectify that immediately!
I live in a world without magic or miracles. A place where there are no clairvoyants or shapeshifters, no angels or superhuman boys to save you. A place where people die and music disintegrates and things suck. I am pressed so hard against the earth by the weight of reality that some days I wonder how I am still able to lift my feet to walk.
Former piano prodigy Nastya Kashnikov wants two things: to get through high school without anyone learning about her past and to make the boy who took everything from her—her identity, her spirit, her will to live—pay.
Josh Bennett’s story is no secret: every person he loves has been taken from his life until, at seventeen years old, there is no one left. Now all he wants is be left alone and people allow it because when your name is synonymous with death, everyone tends to give you your space.
Everyone except Nastya, the mysterious new girl at school who starts showing up and won’t go away until she’s insinuated herself into every aspect of his life. But the more he gets to know her, the more of an enigma she becomes. As their relationship intensifies and the unanswered questions begin to pile up, he starts to wonder if he will ever learn the secrets she’s been hiding—or if he even wants to.
Published November 13th 2012 by Atria Books
I hate my left hand. I hate to look at it. I hate it when it stutters and trembles and reminds me that my identity is gone.
But I look at it anyway; because it also reminds me that I’m going to find the boy who took everything from me. I’m going to kill the boy who killed me, and when I kill him, I’m going to do it with my left hand.
Dying really isn’t so bad after you’ve done it once. And I have. I’m not afraid of death anymore.
I live in a world without magic or miracles. A place where there are no clairvoyants or shapeshifters, no angels or superhuman boys to save you. A place where people die and music disintegrates and things suck. I am pressed so hard against the earth by the weight of reality that some days I wonder how I am still able to lift my feet to walk.
Give me a few more days and I’ll probably be able to draw a map and star the best places for disappearing. Then I can sell it to other losers like me.
Then I sat on the ground and cried— the ugly kind of crying where you keep sucking breaths in all at once and it makes that horrible sound as the air scrapes against your throat.
She’s like an optical illusion. You look at it from one angle and you see the picture and you think you’ve got a lock on it and then it shifts and the image changes to something entirely different and you can’t even find the original picture anymore. It’s a serious mindfuck.
“It’s on the bathroom floor.” He’s smiling at the carpet, not at me, when he says it. “You seemed really disgusted by it for some reason. Ripped it out from under your shirt, through your sleeve, in one fluid motion and flung it across the room. It was pretty impressive.”
Dysentery was topping my excuse list today.
I have a black belt in self-pity. I was an expert in the field. Still am. It’s a skill you never forget.
Maybe I don’t blame myself for what happened, but when they tell you that something was completely and utterly random, they’re also telling you something else. That nothing you do matters. It doesn’t matter if you do everything right, if you dress the right way and act the right way and follow all the rules, because evil will find you anyway.
If eavesdropping on someone else’s nightmares is supposed to make me feel better, I’d rather stay feeling like shit.
Sometimes it’s easier to pretend nothing is wrong than to face the fact that everything is wrong, but you’re powerless to do anything about it.
It amazes me how people are so afraid of what can happen in the dark, but they don’t give a second thought about their safety during the day, as if the sun offers some sort of ultimate protection from all the evil in the world. It doesn’t. All it does is whisper to you, lulling you with its warmth before it shoves you facedown into the dirt. Daylight won’t protect you from anything. Bad things happen all the time; they don’t wait until after dinner.
It’s just another piece of the puzzle she is. But the more she gives me, the more abstract she gets. It’s like pieces to three different puzzles. You try to put them together but they never fit, and when you force them, the picture comes out all wrong.
"People like to say love is unconditional, but it’s not, and even if it was unconditional, it’s still never free. There’s always an expectation attached. They always want something in return. Like they want you to be happy or whatever, and that makes you automatically responsible for their happiness because they won’t be happy unless you are. You’re supposed to be who they think you’re supposed to be and feel how they think you’re supposed to feel because they love you, and when you can’t give them what they want, they feel shitty, so you feel shitty, and everybody feels shitty. I just don’t want that responsibility.”
I’m used to being alone, but tonight I feel more alone. Like I’m not just alone in my house, I’m alone in the world. And maybe that’s its own blessing, because now I never have to do this again.
It’s like The Breakfast Club in a powder keg in here and I’m wondering who’s going to light the match.
I wonder if anybody here has an invisibility cloak I could borrow, because that would be awesome right now.
I want him to touch me. Here. Now. Everywhere. Always.
How every normal family is one tragedy away from complete implosion.
I’ve done goodbyes before, and I can do this one, too. Somehow this one hurts worse than the others, because this one I could prevent if I wanted to, since I’m the one saying it. This goodbye comes with a choice the way none of the others ever did.
Like the glass I’ve been looking through is coated in the dust of my own perception and I haven’t seen what’s real. Because before it was black and white, evil and not. And that’s the most confusing part— figuring out what’s true.
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