Piper Payne

“I watched him with wonder like the stars watch the moon, falling in love with every crescent, dark side, and dream.”

“Her silence should be feared more than her words.”

“A disastrous flaw in our design is that the heart always defies the brain.”

“Love alone means nothing unless you have a tortured heart for it to soothe.”

“If love were human I would’ve set them on fire by now — a screaming blaze of smoke and flesh. I’d breathe in the blackness once more just to feel love’s destruction, its mortality filling in the hollow of my ribcage without a heart.”

“Sometimes I think my scars are beautiful, but then I remember not everyone shares the same love of art.”

“There is something beautiful about a blank canvas, the nothingness of the beginning that is so simple and breathtakingly pure. It’s the paint that changes its meaning and the hand that creates the story. Every piece begins the same, but in the end they are all uniquely different.”

“Pain writes the words, sorrow wields the pen, tears wet the paper, and the story mends the heart.”

“The ending of your story all depends on the beginning of ours.”

“Life is a lie. We should fear it more than death. We live fearful of dying, terrified of the unknown … when, really, every truth is in our last breath.”

“It's the in-between, the sustenance, not just the gears and bolts that make a human. When you forget to find out how the person was built—the oil, chemistry, and the craft—you miss all the beauty.”

“He knows her like man knows earth, touching the surface but unaware of her depth.”

“Sometimes I can feel my darkness, like a fragment of nerves inside of me somewhere, sparking my hate. I picture it moving throughout my body, the other cells letting it pass by, yielding to its master. It moves to my tongue when it wants me to spew beautiful, damaging words, it moves to my hands when it wants me to feel all it can take away, and it moves to my eyes to blind me from truly seeing the destruction I’ve done.”