Penelope Douglas

“Misha, my best friend who got me into bed and fucked me with a lie.”

“Fallon affected my body in weird ways. But only because she’s different, I told myself.”

“But we were different now. I wanted only his pain, and judging from the girl he’d come home with last night, Madoc was still the same. A user.”

“Experience is the best teacher.”

“But that was two years ago. She wasn’t sexy to me anymore. Now she was lethal.”

“I read once that the best thing that can happen to a woman is to get her heart broken. Before that, she has no real sense of herself. No real sense of pain, because only in love does she know what it’s like to find the one thing that gives her breath and then to lose it. After that she knows she can survive. No matter what relationships come and go, she can count on herself to pull through, and although it hurts, the break is necessary.”

“A man who stands in front of a woman does nothing more that block her view. She needs a man standing next to her.”

“It’s odd to see how no one is really human to us until we talk to them and realize there’s barely any separation between who we are and who they are.”

“Sometimes I wore smiles but didn’t feel them. Sometimes I felt them and didn’t wear them. I didn’t want her to know how much I craved this. I bit my bottom lip.”

“The world isn’t always what’s right in front of you, you know? It’s below, it’s above, it’s out there somewhere. Every burn of every light inside every house I see when I look down from the rooftop has a story. Sometimes we just need to change our perspective. And when I look down at everything, I remember that there’s more out there than just what’s going on in my house—the bullshit with my dad, school, my future. I look at all those full houses, and I remember, I’m just one of many. It’s not to say we’re not special or important, but it’s comforting, I guess. You don’t feel so alone.”

“You have to have something to love. Something to fight for to make living a goal instead of a job.”

“The closer you got to anything beautiful, the less beautiful it became. Allure was in the mystery, not the appearance.”

“I call it the “Fuck up, own up, and get up” policy. Make a mistake, admit it, and move on. We all screw up, but a man solves his problems. He doesn’t make them worse.”

“My eyes burn with tears, and I'm so tired. So tired of holding back everything I feel and want to say. So tired of being someone I'm not and making mistakes that I didn't have any fun making.”

“It's odd to see how no one is really human to us until we talk to them and realize there's barley any separation between who we are and who they are.”