Quotes by Amy Reed

Do you remember? Do you remember the world before the poison?

I’m feeling really hopeful about it, like maybe I actually have a chance to get better. To be happy. It’s funny, I just realized that my whole life, the whole time I’ve been trying to be perfect, I never once considered happiness as part of the equation. I guess it seemed so impossible I couldn’t even let myself fantasize about it. But now, I don’t know, things feel different somehow. Like impossible things might not be so impossible.

There is a picture of me in their heads, a picture of someone I dont know yet. She is not the chubby girl with the braces and bad perm. She is not the girl hiding in the bathroom at recess. She is someone new, a blank slate they have named beautiful. That is what I am now: beautiful, with this new body and face and hair and clothes. Beautiful, with this erasing of history.

I wonder if anybody else feels this way, if anyone in here is as scared as I am. Are they as sad and angry and confused and ashamed? Is that even possible? Is it even possible for one building to hold all that pain?

Phones are only good for ordering pizza and telling someone youre running late

Do you remember? Do you remember the world before the dark? Do you remember the world with mothers and fathers and stillness that did not feel like death?

What if Im so broken I can never do something as basic as feed myself? Do you realize how twisted that is? It amazes me sometimes that humans still exist. Were just animals, after all. And how can an animal get so removed from nature that it loses the instinct to keep itself alive?

Id love to wrap myself inside your sadness and pretend it is mine

I said just let me try one more time and she said, THATS ENOUGH, ISABEL, again, and she could just say it over and over and it would never get through my thick skull because Im always wanting and wanting because nothing is ever enough you are never enough I am never enough I am never enough I AM NEVER ENOUGH.

You act like youre invincible, but I know deep down you want someone to hold your hand and buy you flowers and look you in the eye and tell you youre his soul mate. You want someone who will love every piece of you, even the pieces you cant love yourself.

What if I cant ever be who you want me to be? What if I keep letting you down?

All I know is I want you to be happy, and if I could do anything to give that to you, I would.

I dont know if anyone can ever really explain why they believe in someone. But I do. I believe in you. I hope thats worth something.

They said the doctors could tell from the scars.Stop.Scars can tell you how old the wound is.Stop.When I stopped going to school, they came and found me. They found me in the closet.Sarah.

There is a whole other world with an entirely different version of me, a me that is not pretty, a me that no boys want, a me she would never talk to.

Shirley: Christopher, would you like to tell Olivia what F.I.N.E means?Christopher: Fucked-up, Insecure, Neurotic, and Emotional...Olivia: But what if you really do feel fine?Shirley: Christopher, care to answer that?Christopher: Um, theres no such feeling as fine.

Your boyfriend smells bad, says Sarah as she sniffs the armpit of the giant sweatshirt.All boys smell bad I say and she nods her head like we have just figured out something very important.

Imagine trying to live without air.Now imagine something worse.

I think before I ever became an alcoholic, before I even tasted alcohol or tried drugs, I was already programmed to be this way. Before there was cocaine or vodka or sex or any of that, there was fantasy. There was escape. That was my first addiction. I remember being a little kid and imagining everything different, myself different. How did I get the idea in my head at age eight that everything was better somewhere else? Why would a child have a hole inside that can’t get full no matter what she does? The real world could never make me happy, so I retreated to the world inside my head. And as I grew, as the real world proved itself more and more painful, the fantasy world expanded.

I don’t feel great, but I also don’t feel terrible, either, and I guess that’s how normal people feel most of the time. They live in the space between black and white, and their ups and downs are various shades of gray, not the extreme highs and lows I’ve always thought of as normal. I think that’s one of the major differences between us and them, between addicts and Normies. Somewhere along the line we got stuck on this roller coaster that only knows how to go to the highest up and the lowest low. We get high so we can feel invincible and perfect, but the feeling never lasts. Gravity always wins, and we fall fast, to a place lower and darker than many people will probably ever know. And the crazy thing is that this is just normal for us. We cycle through these extremes all the time, and it’s become as natural as breathing. Exhausting, but natural.