Quotes by Lauren DeStefano

This is the real Madame. I can see why she hides herself in accents and gems and exotic perfumes. I can see why shes grown to hate anything to do with love. She isnt evil or corrupt the way that Vaughn is. Shes broken. Only broken.

I start trying to stay unconscious. The problem with this is that no amount of willpower can change the reality.

I think hes beginning to understand, and understanding is a horrible thing.

She’s a commodity in a sea of broken girls.

There is a silence so great that I can hear the ice crystals cracking and falling from eyelashes of girls who will never blink again.

We were his disposable things. Brought to him like cattle. Stripped of what made us sisters or daughters or children. There was nothing that he could take from us—our genes, our bones, our wombs—that would ever satisfy him. There was no other way that we would be free.

We didnt make ourselves, she says. We arent the greatest things to exist. I cant believe that. I wont believe that. We have too many faults.

Love unrequited is violent. He loves you so much that hes turned it into hate.

It is the face of a girl who has seen the world, who realizes that it hates her, and who hates it in return.

She knew that the dead hid pieces of themselves in the world. They buried organs in the living. They stuffed memories into trees and clouds and other innocuous things.

Her hair is full of icy wind and daylight. She is every princess, every queen, in the history book.

I still dont know where you came from, he says. Some days its like you just fell from the sky.Some days I feel like I did. I say.

I think humans have always been desperate. I think it has always been about doing something awful if it might help, when the only other option is death. Maybe thats what being a parent is supposed to feel like.

Lovers are weapons, but love is a wound.

You can try to please everyone and risk accomplishing nothing, or go for your dreams and risk pissing a few people off.

My father warned me that you’re an interloper. He told me I should make you leave, since we’re no longer married and you’re not my concern,” he says. The thought gives me a chill. Yes, I’m sure Vaughn would love for his son to abandon me, so that Vaughn can swoop in and reclaim me the second I’m alone. But Linden adds, “I told him that wouldn’t be a good idea either.

Home? I say. Its a word that can mean anywhere and nowhere.

Wanting to be happy is not stupid.

The madness of youth made me unafraid.

Well squeeze every second that we can from our lives, because were young, and we have plenty of years to grow. Well grow until were braver. Well grow until our bones ache and our skin wrinkles and our hair goes white, and until our hearts decide, at last, that its time to stop.