Quotes by Cora Carmack

Do me a favor? Be a gentleman tomorrow?

The timbre of his voice went into that low register that made my insides curl in on themselves--it was like my uterus was tapping out a happy dance on the rest of my organs.

I will call bullshit on that so many times that the word bullshit will lose all meaning. -Milo

Because try as I might, perfect doesnt guarantee me anything. I cant control whether other people will want me or love me or even like me. I can only control how I feel about myself.

Everything in the world might be connected, but that doesnt mean the way we feel about them has to be.

I hold her, and I know now why caring about another person is so damn scary. Its not that they wont care about you back, because that either happens or it doesnt. You live with it or you do everything you can to change it. The really scary thing is the moment you realize that for the rest of your life, youll feel twice the pain, twice the joy, twice the fear. Twice as helpless to control it all, too.

And all the restless energy floating through me keeps connecting to him and coming back twice as strong, like were this closed circuit, and the longer we stay linked, the more powerful the pull between us becomes.

We go through our whole lives thinking that we belong in one place and not in another. We think certain ideas and actions have to be relegated to the tiny little boxes we place them in. What if we just reacted instead? What if we take whatever the world gives us and instead of focusing on what it isnt, we enjoy what it is?

You want to hear it? Fine. It’s a simple story really, about a pretty girl who was pretty stupid. She let a man touch her because she was scared to say no, and then she told her parents because she was scared to say nothing. Then they were scared to do anything that might ruin their pretty little lives, so they told the girl that it was nothing. That just being touched wasn’t enough to fight for. Too scared to prove them wrong, she kept going like it was nothing, and she let more people touch her, never knowing that she was handing out pieces of herself. Or, hell, maybe she knew deep down, and she just hated herself so much that she was glad to be rid of them. And life wasn’t pretty, but it also wasn’t scary until she met a man with two names who touched her without taking and made her miss the pieces she had lost. And now things aren’t just scary, they’re fucking terrifying, and I can’t do it. I can’t live like this, knowing all that I’ve ruined and that it can’t be fixed.

He caught my hands as they pulled through my hair, and pulled my body against his, and I felt all the holes in me. My sobs echoed through them like caverns, and I never would have thought empty could be made of such weight.I couldn’t breathe around it.

I get what its like to want something, but to try and force yourself to really believe that you dont.

Youre not horrible, Kelsey. You are vibrant and beautiful, and you burn. Burn so vividly. Fires can damage, but theyre also beautiful and vital and they can purify and give the chance for a fresh start. Youre not horrible. Not at all.

Call it an issue. Call it baggage. But I really hated lies. Theyre ugly things, festering like wounds, spreading like disease. Theyre winner-less crimes that hurt everybody in the end.

I always thought I was an extrovert until I became a theatre major. Then I realised I just didnt like silence.

We spend so much time defending our choice to do this that it becomes hard to show any vulnerability at all. Theres only so many times you can handle someone asking about your fall back for when things dont work before you start thinking that maybe the fall back should just be your plan.

The future is never just one choice. Its a thousand. And they never stop. You will choose your future every day of your life. And should you wake up one day to find that you regret the choice you made the day before, then make a new one. Dont worry about whether you might be wrong someday. Worry about whether youre right now. Tomorrow can wait.

Tell me Im not crazy, He said. I couldnt do that. I was nowhere near sane enough at the moment to advise anyone else on rational behavior.

This funny thing happens when you graduate college. You hear so much about being an adult that you start to feel like you have to become a different person overnight, that growing up means being not you. And you concentrate so hard on living up to the term adult that you forget growing up happens by living, not by sheer force of will.

we should live like we smoke— inhale the present and exhale the past.

I’ll take my chances against your fickle heart if it means it’s mine.