Julie Johnson

“A boy made of stardust and selfishness; a girl filled with fire and fury at the world. We are a tangle of emotional wreckage, two broken messes thrown together, trying to navigate something we can barely comprehend.”

“People are always waiting around for that magical person who’ll walk into their life and fix them, who’ll offer up some vital piece they’ve been missing and make them complete. They spend years trying to fit their broken edges against another person’s and call themselves whole and healed. The only problem with this, of course, is that expecting anyone else to fix you is an unequivocal disaster.You can't wait for a man to come around and put you back together. You have to put yourself back together first, and become the kind of woman who deserves a good man.”

“It might've started as a lie, Faith, but it sure as hell didn't end as one. I might not have been real to you, and that's fine. But you have to know... you were real to me." His voice dropped so low I could barely hear him. "It was real to me. It's still real. The realest fucking thing I've ever felt.”

“Of all the people in the world who could've won the seat next to mine at that playoff game... it was you, Gemma. You. The one person on the planet who might just understand me.”

“I am not the Juliet to his Romeo. I am not the lodestar around which he orbits. I am not the trade wind by which he sets the course of his sails. I am not essential or exceptional.I was his Monday girl. Shitty, really, since he was my whole damn week.”

“People say love isn’t supposed to be painful. But maybe the best things in life are the ones that hurt the most after they’re gone.”

“I find some small, twisted comfort in thinking that perhaps we used each other. Him, for a glimpse into what it would be like to live a life entirely different from the one he'd been raised to desire, and me for the steady diet of angst and emotional damage that seemed to make me better, sharper, like a sword against a whetstone.I was his intellectual escape from a long parade of pretty, empty girls... and he was my drug of choice -- unhealthy, probably lethal, but ultimately so addictive it was hard to turn away.The problem, of course, with this theory of mutual exploitation, is that it is the deepest of lies. There was nothing equal or mutual about the way we used each other. I barely scratched his surface while he sliced me limb from limb.There's no comfort in that. None at all.”

“Being heartbroken doesn’t mean you stop feeling. Just the opposite — it means you feel it all more. With your heart in fragments, every sensation is sharper, every emotion more acute. Your feelings are enhanced, like a blind man with an impeccable sense of smell, or a deaf woman whose eyes can perceive things a normal person would never recognize. The brokenhearted are the best empaths of all.”

“You think you can change a guy, that he’ll be different with you, that you’ll finally be the one to tame him… and before you know it, you’re alone in your underwear at nine o’clock on a Saturday night, crying to Adele songs, eating ice cream straight from the gallon, and wondering what the hell is the matter with you that you fell for such a goddamned man-child, after he explicitly warned you not to.”

“When you start to fall, don't try to talk yourself out of it. The right man will be there at the bottom, to catch you.”

“I pour another drink and wash the taste of dashed dreams from the back of my tongue. I feel half-dead, but my broken heart somehow still beats. What a stubborn, senseless organ, to keep going when all hope and happiness are lost.”

“Grayson Dunn is in my head. He's under my skin. He's invaded me like a deadly disease and hijacked my immune system until I don't even bother fighting it anymore. I look at him, and I'm twisted into knots. Tangled into a messy spool of desire and desperation.”

“Take a risk on messy. Live Fearlessly. Love recklessly. Most of all, just love.”

“When you’ve spent your whole life not being good enough, it takes time to let yourself believe that you finally are. Self-worth isn’t a switch that flips inside you. It’s a daily struggle not to sabotage your own success. Not to cave into the voices inside your head that whisper you’re not good enough, or you’ll fuck things up, or that someone else could do things better than you.”

“No amount of soul searching would fix my past. There was no magical Band-Aid I could stick on my heart, no special glue I could use to make myself whole again. I had shattered to pieces like a fragile vase on concrete; some fragments could be roughly cobbled back together, but many of my vital parts had simply turned to dust, pulverized and scattered by the first gust of wind.”

“To those who would love me - I offer you a warning. Do no get to close. You won't survive.”