Stay Quotes
"An untold story has a weight that can submerge you, sure as a sunken ship at the bottom of the ocean."
"The way two people can end up in the same place, find each other in a crowd, and change their lives and the lives of the people around them forever... It makes you believe in fate."
"Love at first sight should send you running, if you know what’s good for you. It’s your dark pieces having instant recognition with their dark pieces."
"You have ordinary moments and ordinary moments and more ordinary moments, and then, suddenly, there is something monumental right there."
"You have past and future colliding in the present, your own personal Big Bang, and nothing will ever be the same."
"I could write in the back of a pickup truck driving across the country."
"I’ve got to have good things around you now, right, Pea?"
"Deception Pass—you couldn’t have missed that bridge spanning those waters."
"Look right at that fear. Fear is the biggest bullshitter."
"I keep feeling like we have to go. Like we have to hurry."
"You’re not the depressed type, C.P. When have you ever been the depressed type?"
"I could sleep years, that’s how tired I was."
"You’d imagine with a feeling like that, a person could sleep easy."
"Every time I see people in social circumstances like that, I can’t help but imagine them in junior high, worrying about who they’re going to eat lunch with."
"It’s your best day, and then your worst. It’s your most hope and then your most despair."
"If you think something is one thing, but then it’s another."
"It’s hard to believe, but it’s true. Your old chin can be magic like that, who would have thought."
"I love seeing you in the seat beside me."
"It felt very Mr. and Mrs., being in his car with him driving."
"You did that when you started to care a lot—you worried he was watching your every move to make sure he really wanted you."
"You take care of the people you love, but it's true, too, that you take care of the things you own."
"The thought that I might lose him turned down to some dim light, a distant hum; still, it was a bad, panicked feeling I would remember."
"We like the thought of being held, until it's too tight. We like that certainty, until it means there is no way out."
"It’s strange, isn’t it, how that idea of belonging to someone can sound so great?"
"I felt anxious, confused. I wanted to call him right then, that minute, but I didn’t."
"Love must be more about power than we think, if even in its most intimate moment of expression we think about not being the one who risks the most."
"Bad things happened. It was like seeing something great on the beach... and when you got close, you saw it was something that made you look away."
"Routine is cement for some people, coziness made solid, certainty building more certainty."
"I had never been a liar, but now they rolled off my tongue like lies were a second language I was suddenly fluent in."
"No explanation would be good enough, ever. If he had kept this card since that night, if he chose that meaning over the one the card really had—his truths would never, could never, be what the truth really was."
"Sometimes that’s all you need. To know it’s not broken. To know you’re still whole and that you’ll heal."
"No, we are the ones who haunt ourselves. I am sure of it."
"It was possible that Christian was crazy."
"People can attach themselves to something—an idea, another person, a desire—with an impossibly strong grip, and in the case of restless ghosts, a grip stronger than death."
"We made up, but I knew I had already decided something."
"The signs, anyway—they aren’t enough to make you understand what is really going to happen."
"Breaking up could sit in front of you for a while. It was a ring of fire you had to at last decide to run through."
"Sometimes maybe you should let someone you love travel great distances away from you."
"I would wait an eternity for you. I will wait."
"I was scared. I felt it right there in the Bishops’ bathroom, because it seemed like my father kept getting farther away from me, and I needed every anchor I had left. I needed to understand what was real, what I had to be afraid of and what I didn’t."
"We washed dishes in that candlelight, Finn’s arms plunged into the soapy water and me with the towel."
"He pulled me close. His face was so sweet in that candlelight."
"I don’t know if it’s what every girl wants, but it’s what I wanted, that feeling, being held firmly, the sense that any storm could come and blow the roof right off but in his arms there’d be shelter."
"It’s wrong, how shortchanged some moments are. So brief, and yet you can sit in some miserable math class for fifty of the longest minutes of your life."
"You can sit in the DMV, you can have an argument, you can go to the dentist—hours. And yet a sweet kiss is over so fast."
"You wonder, do you, why seashore towns and lighthouses always have ghosts? Because this is where the violent seas meet turbulent shore, where ships of men leave loved ones behind, witnesses to storms and loss and the drowning and crashing of that loss."
"Fear was the biggest bullshitter, he’d said. But sometimes, too, fear told the truth."
"We see a promise as a personal law, and we see the people who break them as private-life criminals."
"The obligations we should feel toward others tangled with the obligations we should never, ever feel."
"What did I owe her? he wanted to know, and I had no answer for him."
"I realized then that I hadn’t played Christian’s message. I felt the sudden need to."
"I saw the boat in my mind, the choppy black waters. The woman who was my mother, throwing it all away."
"I felt my insides spinning, and he came and put his arms around me and I didn’t want them there, but I did want them, too, because we were all each other had, really."
"He was my family and I was his, and my mother had belonged to us both."
"My father wiped his eyes with his fingertips. He inhaled, exhaled. "We’ve got to make a plan, Clara. He could come here. He could be here."
"A promise can be buoyant as whispered words or solemn as a marriage vow, but we view it as something pure and untouchable when it should never be either of those things."
"If a promise is a personal law, a contract, then it ought to be layered with fine print, rules and conditions, promises within those promises."
"You could care enough to keep a secret, but you could care enough to tell one, too."
"His Finn-ness was better than a mountain of spoken feelings."
"I watched the trees shaking off the wind."
"I want to let you know that whatever the word is that’s more appropriate than love right now... I whatever-that-word-is you."
"It seemed better to keep wanting more than to have too much."
"You should stay tucked in. It’s supposed to be really bad tonight."
"You don’t usually feel fate until you see evidence of it afterward."
"How could you tell the fear inside from the danger outside?"
"It’s about not telling yourself anymore that you don’t know what you do know."
"The images are all wild things that will do what they wish."
"The remembering, and that wind, is what pushes you forward."
"We can’t get so wrapped up in our own misconceptions that we miss the simple beauty of the truth."
"Our bodies are ninety-eight percent water."
"People will do what they will do. The trick is admitting your own helplessness about that little fact."