Ava Love Quotes

I think a lot of people want to be someone, but we are scared that if we try, we won't be as good as everyone imagines we could be.

Love makes us such fools.

And maybe what growing up really means is knowing that you don't have to be just a character, going whichever way the story says. It's knowing you could be the author instead.

Just because love don't look the way you think it should, don't mean you don't have it.

You can be noble and brave and beautiful and still find yourself falling.

You don’t have to work overtime to get people to love you, Ava. Love isn’t earned, it’s given.

When we are in love, we are both completely in danger and completely saved.

I know I wrote letters to people with no address on this earth, I know that you are dead. But I hear you. I hear all of you. We were here. Our lives matter.

But we aren't transparent. If we want someone to know us, we have to tell them stuff.

There's more to life than being a passenger.

Love, as most know, follows its own timeline. Disregarding our intentions or well rehearsed plans.

i love reading because it is fun

Truth is beautiful, no matter what the truth is. Even if it's scary or bad. It is beauty simply because it's true. And truth is bright. Truth makes you more you.

You think you know someone, but that person always changes, and you keep changing, too. I understood it suddenly, how that’s what being alive means. Our own invisible plates shifting inside of our bodies, beginning to align into the people we are going to become.

There are a lot of human experiences that challenge the limits of our language,” she said. “That’s one of the reasons that we have poetry.

I will love you to ruination.

I found it ironic that I should be blessed with wings and yet feel so constrained, so trapped. It was because of my condition, I believe, that I noticed life's ironies a bit more often than the average person. I collected them: how love arrived when you least expected it, how someone who said he didn't want to hurt you eventually would.

What I told you about saving people isn't true. You might think it is, because you might want someone else to save you, or you might want to save someone so badly. But no one else can save you, not really. Not from yourself. [...] You fall asleep in the foothills, and the wolf comes down from the mountains. And you hope someone will wake you up. Or chase it off. Or shoot it dead. But when you realize that the wolf is inside you, that's when you know. You can't run from it. And no one who loves you can kill the wolf, because it's part of you. They see your face on it. And they won't fire the shot.

she walked like she belonged in a better world,

May, I love you with everything I am. For so long, I just wanted to be like you. But I had to figure out that I am someone too, and now I can carry you, your heart with mine, everywhere I go.

Sex isn't all that important, but it is when you love someone very much.

Nirvana means freedom. Freedom from suffering. I guess some people would say that death is just that. So, congratulations on being free, I guess. The rest of us are still here, grappling with all that's been torn up.

I loved you before, Ava. Let me love you still.

I wish you could tell me where you are now. I mean, I know you’re dead, but I think there must be something in a human being that can’t just disappear. It’s dark out. You’re out there. Somewhere, somewhere. I’d like to let you in.

I mean, words can't be good enough for a lot of things. But, you know, I guess we have to try.

It's sad when everyone knows you, but no one knows you.

Sometimes when we say things, we hear silence. Or only echoes. Like screaming from inside. And that’s really lonely. But that only happens when we weren’t really listening. It means we weren’t ready to listen yet. Because every time we speak, there is a voice. There is the world that answers back.

I will love you to ruination,” the Fairy King said, brushing a strand of golden hair from my cheek. “Yours or mine?” I asked. The Fairy King did not answer.

I know that it can be hard to believe that someone loves you if you are afraid of being yourself, or if you are not exactly sure who you are. It can be hard to believe that someone won't leave.

So maybe when we can say things, when we can write the words, when we can express how it feels, we aren’t so helpless.

A friend is someone who gives you total freedom to be yourself - and especially to feel, or not to feel. Whatever you happen to be feeling at any moment is fine with them. That's what real love amounts to -- letting a person be what he really is.

I think that by beauty, you don't just mean something that's pretty. You mean something that makes us human.

To many, I was myth incarnate, the embodiment of a most superb legend, a fairy tale. Some considered me a monster, a mutation. To my great misfortune, I was once mistaken for an angel. To my mother, I was everything. To my father, nothing at all. To my grandmother, I was a daily reminder of loves long lost. But I knew the truth—deep down, I always did. I was just a girl.

How could she just leave me here to live without her? I miss her so much. I love her. I want her to grow up and become who she was meant to be. I wanted her to grow up with me.

We do things sometimes because we feel so much inside of us, and we don’t notice how it affects somebody else.

I feel like I am drowning in memories. Everything is too bright.

By this point Viviane Lavender had loved Jack Griffith for twelve years, which was far more than half of her life. If she thought of her love as a commodity and were to, say, eat it, it would fill 4,745 cherry pies. If she were to preserve it, she would need 23,725 glass jars and labels and a basement spanning the length of Pinnacle Lane. If she were to drink it, she'd drown.

The thing about traditions is that they hold up the shape of your memory.

To my mother, I was everything. To my father, nothing at all. To my grandmother, I was a daily reminder of loves long lost.

You learned right away that applause sounds like love.

If beauty is truth, and truth is beauty, they are defined by each other, so how do we know the meaning of either?

Do you feel that?’ He flattens my palms on his chest and holds them there firmly. ‘It was made to love you, Ava. For too long it was useless, redundant, not required. Now it’s gone into overdrive. It swells with happiness when I look at you. It splinters with pain when we fight. And it beats wildly when I make love to you. Maybe I go overboard with my love, but that’s never going to change. I’ll love you this fiercely until the day I die, baby. Children or not.

I think it’s like when you lose something so close to you, it’s like losing yourself. That’s why at the end, it’s hard for her to write even. She can hardly remember how. Because she barely knows what she is anymore.

The universe is bigger than anything that can fit into your mind.

She found that she did not mind losing the previous moment, for this one was just as lovely.

We are each weird in a different way, but together, that's actually normal.

I'll die loving you, Ava.

I've been thinking lately about immortality. What it means to be remembered, what I want to be remembered for, certain questions concerning memory and fame. I love watching old movies. I watch the faces of long-dead actors on the screen, and I think about how they'll never truly die. I know that's a cliché but it happens to be true. Not just the famous ones who everyone knows, the Clark Gables, the Ava Gardners, but the bit players, the maid carrying the tray, the butler, the cowboys in the bar, the third girl from the left in the nightclub. They're all immortal to me. First we only want to be seen, but once we're seen, that's not enough anymore. After that, we want to be remembered.

Nothing is worse than when someone who's supposed to love you just leaves.

Maybe, in the final analysis, they saw me as something I wasn't and I tried to turn them into something they could never be. I loved them all but maybe I never understood any of them. I don't think they understood me.

You know when you think you know someone? More than anyone in the world? You know you know them, because you've seen them, like, for real. And then you reach out, and suddenly they are just... gone. You though you belonged together. You thought they were yours, but they're not. You want to protect them, but you can't.

Judy, I read that you said your first memory was music. Music that fills up a home. And one day, suddenly the music could escape through a window. For the rest of your life, you had to chase it.

She is the glorious reincarnation of every woman ever loved.

Ava screamed again, and my heart tripped. I almost wished there were an intruder so I had something physical to fight.

Effy found herself half in love with the Fairy King sometimes, too. The tender belly of his cruelty made her heart flutter. There was an intimacy to all violence, she supposed. The better you knew someone, the more terribly you could hurt them.

You don't have to love something in order to devote yourself to it.

the ghosts in the house are ours, and I just want to be with them.

She didn't see it because when it came to love, she saw what she wanted to see.

Sometimes we want our bodies to do a better job of showing the things that hurt us, the stories we keep hidden inside of us.

Love is a fire that cannot burn alone

Water finds its way through the smallest spaces and the narrowest cracks. Where the bone meets sinew, where the skin is split. It is treacherous and loving. You can die as easily of thirst as you can of drowning.

To think Viviane was beautiful required a certain acquired taste. It was the kind of beauty perceived only through the eyes of love.

I will love you to ruination." "Whose ruination? Your's or mine?" You did not answer and I still wonder.

I grasped her chin and angled her face toward mine. “Tell me who or what I need to kill,” I growled. “What happened at your father’s house?” “I told you, nothing. It was just the lake.” Ava eked out a wobbly smile. “You can’t kill a lake.” “I’ll drain every fucking lake and ocean in the world if I have to.” A tiny crystal tear slipped from her eye. “Alex…” “I mean it.” I rubbed the tear away with my thumb. My heart raged in my chest, a snarling beast furious at the sight of her distress and the thought there was something in the world that would dare hurt her.

It was a world full of feelings that I didn’t have words for yet.

While he scurried off to another part of the gallery, Ava learned in and hissed, "Alex the piece costs $40,000." "Really? Shit." "I'm sure we can-" "I thought it was expensive.

I’m trying to save you, Ava,” he said… “From what?” I refused to look at him, but I could see him watching me out of the corner of my eye. “From me.” I didn’t respond, because how was I supposed to tell the man determined to save me that I didn’t want to be saved?

I think the main reason my marriages failed is that I always loved too well but never wisely.

He had loved nothing more than the truth, and she had loved nothing more than her imagined world. Somehow, in spite of that, they had found each other.

When you have to face up to the fact that marriage to the man you love is really over, that's very tough, sheer agony. In that kind of harrowing situation, I always go away and cut myself off from the world. Also, I sober up immediately when there is genuine bad news in my life; I never face it with alcohol in my brain. I just rented a house in Palm Springs and sat there and just suffered for a couple of weeks. I suffered there until I was strong enough to face it.

I met someone.' And the leaves fell from the trees, landing to float in the calm black waters.

the woman is rain, and when she falls, she is a monsoon. to love her is to drown.

There are a lot of human experiences that challenge the limits of our language,

some people are so deep you fall into them and you never stop falling.

Halloween is one of my favorite holidays. Christmas and the others can end up making you sad, because you know you should be happy. But on Halloween you get to become anything that you want to be

Sometimes your music sounds like there's too much inside of you. Maybe even you couldn't get it all out. Maybe that's why you died. Like you exploded from the inside.

I think it's like when you lose something so close to you, it's like losing yourself.

Why do you think that’s the most profound thing for a person? It’s both at once. When we are in love, we are both completely in danger and completely saved.

Ava is like a praying mantis on crack. She will not only chew off his head after she has sex with him, she will have sex with his headless body afterwards and then light it on fire.

For a very long time, Viviane and Jack lived in that world people inhabit before love. Some people called that place friendship; others called it confusing. Viviane found it a pleasant place with an altitude that only occasionally made her nauseous.

Do you think that everyone gets to be a star like that? Do you think that everyone gets to be seen? Gets to be loved? Gets to glow? They don't. They don't get to do it like you did. They don't get to be as beautiful as you were. And you just wanted to burn up.

I want to remember it all, the good times and the bad times, the late nights, the boozing, the dancing into dawns, and all the great and not-so-great people I met and loved in those years…

When you set an intention, you can create transformation.

I’m having Ava withdrawal.’ I melt a little on a sigh. He can be so domineering, bossy and unreasonable, and in the next breath, completely soppy and lovely.

Because once you're afraid of one thing, you can get scared of a lot of stuff.

Maybe when we can tell the stories, however bad they are, we don't belong to them anymore. They become ours. And maybe what growing up really means is knowing that you don't have to just be a character, going whichever way the story says. It's knowing that you could be the author instead.

And maybe that’s what being in love does. So that a life, a person, a moment you need to keep, stays with you into infinity.

You are bravery to me.

the opening, the breaking, the falling apart is always so quick. the hurting, the healing, the putting back together is always too long.

You might want someone else to save you, or might want to save someone so badly. But no one else can save you, not really, not from yourself.

Being a rock star is the intersection of who you are and who you want to be.

It was then that I could feel that the moths in him, with their wings so paper-thin, will never be near enough to the light. They will always want to be nearer - to be inside of it. It was then that I could feel the lost thing in him.

Do you feel that?’ He flattens my palms on his chest and holds them there firmly. ‘It was made to love you, Ava. For too long it was useless, redundant, not required. Now it’s gone into overdrive. It swells with happiness when I look at you. It splinters with pain when we fight. And it beats wildly when I make love to you.

But life isn’t like that. You can’t be sure how it’s going to come out, even if you do everything right. They turn around on you, lives do.

you came in slowly like the fog and consumed me.

My mind is never empty of you. Not in waking; not even in dreaming.

I love you, Ava. I should’ve started this whole crazy thing by saying that. I love you and I missed you like mad. It wasn’t a spell. It was you. I found home.

Grownups can be such fakes, I thought. They are always acting like they are trying to help you, and like they want to take care of you, but really they just want something from you.

It wasn’t fair what happened to you, either. Or what happened to her. A lot of things aren’t. I guess we can either be angry about it forever or else we just have to try to make things better with what we have now.

What a ruthless privilege it was, he thought, to love.

You let me eat up all papa’s anger so it wouldn’t poison you. you didn’t mind that he ruined me as long as you were unspoiled and safe. If you ever loved me, it was because I was a soft thing you threw down into the bottom of a pit to break your fall.

She is the glorious reincarnation of every woman ever loved. It was her face that launched the Trojan War, her untimely demise that inspired the building of India's Taj Mahal. She is every angel in Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel.

This time could be different. This time it could last. Maybe it would be a longer, deeper love: a real and solid entity that lived in the house, used the bathroom, ate their food, mussed up the linens in sleep. A love that pulled her close when she cried, that slept with its chest pressed against her back.

Some sacrifices aren’t worth the cost. Even, or perhaps most especially, those made out of love.

i want so much to touch you where my hands cannot.

Don’t make it hard on me, please. Just, someday in the future, find me. Just find me and come up to me and tell me you still love me and want me and can’t live without me in your arms—

There are still Ava Maddoxes to find and sets to create and girls to kiss and colleges to attend. It's possible that someday I will hear a patsy Cline song and the heartbreak will barely register. It will be some distant, buried feeling. I won't remember how much it once hurt.

My heart went into my throat. I leaned back against Luke, his arm moved to wrap around my chest and we watched two people we both cared a lot about. They were in love, they were healed and most of all, they were outrageously happy.

And if he wants more, she'll give it. If he says, 'God means for us to do this,' she'll believe him.

The house felt haunted, like only I understood the way all of our shadows, the ones we’d left, had seeped into the wood and stained it.

But I think the thing that takes me the most courage is realizing that as many oceans as I might cross, the stupid simple truth will always be on the other side.

People love you for what they want to see in you, not for what you are. That's a sad thing to learn.

I love how he laughs. It’s the color of the sun, soft and warm and golden.

Ava, neither of us anticipated each other and for very different reasons. I know your parents opinion counts for a lot to you, and as it means so much to you, it means a lot to me too. My priority is you. You're all that matters to me. I love you.

In the end I learned that the water was in me. It was a ghost that could not be exorcised. But a guest, even uninvited, must be attended to. You make up a bed for them. You pour from your best bottle of wine. If you can learn to love that wich despises you, you can dance on the shore and play in the waves again, like you did when you were young. Before the ocean is friend or foe, it simply is. And so are you.

Falling out of love was much harder than Gabe would have liked. Normally led through life by the heart attached to his sleeve, finding logic in love proved to be a bit like getting vaccinated for some dread disease: a good idea in the end, but the initial pain certainly wasn’t any fun. He came to appreciate that there were worse ways to live than to live without love. For instance, if he didn’t have arms, Gabe wouldn’t be able to hide in his work. Yes, a life without arms would be quite tragic, indeed.

His heart line was long and curved, and she traced it with her eyes over and over again. A person with a curved heart line was a person capable of great warmth and kindness, a person willing to give their whole selves to love, no matter the cost.

If you let lesser people determine your self-worth, you’ll never reach higher than their limited imagination.” He leaned forward, his expression intense. “You don’t have to work overtime to get people to love you, Ava. Love isn’t earned, it’s given.

Just because love don’t look the way you think it should don’t mean you don’t have it.

But no one else can save you, not really. Not from yourself.

everything i know about love is that it hurts and is almost always never returned the way you want it to. but i have hope because i do not know everything.

That’s my girl. Live a good life, Ava.

I told you, nothing. It was just the lake.” Ava eked out a wobbly smile. “You can’t kill a lake.” “I’ll drain every fucking lake and ocean in the world if I have to.

I have to remind myself that love comes in all sorts of packages.

you have outgrown this skin. stop trying to hold it in. stop trying to hold it together. let yourself break.

I know I could have saved your ashes to put into the ocean, but I wanted you to have the journey, all the way with the currents, to the open sea. And I know that when I finally get to see the waves washing on the shore, to hear them, I will feel you there.

i know it all ends the same, but i was interested in seeing how you would break my heart.

Maybe that's what being in love is. You just keep filling up, never getting fuller, only brighter.

Love, as most know, follows its own timeline, disregarding our intentions or well-rehearsed plans.

Her bedroom walls are covered with magazine pictures, so that the walls don't end at the walls. They go outward, to a dream of somewhere else.

There was something between me and the world right then. I saw it like a big sheet of glass, too thick to break through. I could make new friends, but they could never know me.

you need to be careful with me. i fall in love and i fall in love forever.

After something really bad happens, the next worse thing is people feeling sorry for you about it. It’s like confirmation that something is terribly wrong.

i took it off. i did not want to carry it with me anymore.

i am like the moon-- sometimes, full. sometimes, black. sometimes, forever and ever alone.

Why are you so upset? Why do you look like you’ve just lost your heart? Because the guy you’ve wanted for so long finally wants to be with you? Or because the guy you actually love thinks the worst of you?

It's the opposite of the collapse of the fantasy. It's what happens when the illusion pales in comparison to the truth. I'm seeing her for the first time. Not Ava Garden Wilder, the rags-to-riches granddaughter of Clyde Jones. Not a tragic, romantic heroine. Just Ava. And I am utterly in love.

A black woman making art is a disruptive act. Every story that I tell as a woman is a political act, even if I want to tell a 'silly love story.' The fact it exists through my gaze is radical.

You fall asleep in the foothills, and the wolf comes down from the mountains. And you hope someone will wake you up. Or chase it off. Or shoot it dead. But when you realize that the wolf is inside you, that's when you know. You can't run from it. And no one. who loves you can kill the wolf, because it's part of you. They see you face on it. And they won't fire the shot.

He closes his eyes briefly and looks as if he might say something, but he doesn't, and sometimes when people don't speak, they say everything , don't they?

love is myself in the mirror. i will see love every time.

You taught them that people love you for what they want to see in you, not for what you are.

I would've given him every part of me if he wanted it.

i feel everything. i do not know how to un-feel and to not feel is to stop the sun.

You can’t go because I won’t get over you. I won’t ever find someone like you. I won’t ever kiss a girl like you. I love you.

hold company with yourself so sacred that even when you are alone, you are whole.

I think I loved you then, and hated myself for it

Love whispers, grief shouts.

Our phone bills were astronomical, and when I found the letters Frank wrote me the other day, the total could fill a suitcase. Every single day during our relationship, no matter where in the world I was, I'd get a telegram from Frank saying he loved me and missed me. He was a man who was deseperate for companionship and love. Can you wonder that he always had mine!

Sky turned to look at me, his eyes amused. "Are you?" "Afraid of my voice?" I laughed, nervous. "Yeah, I guess." Then Sky tilted his head to the side a little and got more serious. "I think we all are. With Kurt, it's more like he just faces the fear, you know?

But neither Emilienne nor Connor ever once stopped to ponder the miracles love might bring into their lives. Connor because he didn’t know such things existed, and Emilienne because she did.

Ava... Sweetheart, please. Tell me what I have to do. I'll do anything." "I don't know of there's anything you can do,... I'm sorry." "Then I'll just have to try everything until we find something,

Some people have described Ava as religiously non-observant, but I think she's starved for love. She must have been deprived in her youth. That's why she acts out. Deep down, she didn't have a good opinion of herself. Not that she's perfect. I just think she could use a hug.

i over love. i under love. i am either a flood or i am nothing.

Maybe when we can tell the stories, however bad they are, we don't belong to them anymore. They become ours.

Just yours, Ava. Tell me you love me.

Because of love, of course. The more you love something, the harder it is to lose.

Because I think that by beauty, you don't just mean something that's pretty. You mean something that makes us human.

some people are so deep you fall into them and you never stop falling.

remember you are capable of the most powerful thing in the universe. you are capable of love.

My mother calls it the pretty hate. It comes on you like a fever when someone you love up and leaves you with nothing but silence. You turn the hate on yourself as you cannibalize your heart while the rage burns through you and polishes your desperation into a diamond. It is one of the cruelest things in the world to do to another human being. Don’t do that.

let me tell you i'm in love with you. let me tell you that the first thing i do when i wake is think of you. let me be completely honest about this-- about what you mean to me. let me take it there without ruining everything.

Right.” Ava closed her eyes and took a deep breath. “Alex, bring me a knife.” I paled. “Whoa, whoa, whoa!” I held up one hand and drew Jules closer to me with the other. “I’m your only brother. You love me. Remember when I gave you the last of my Milk Duds at the movie theater? Good times.

To paraphrase Woody Allen in Annie Hall, love was too weak a word for what I felt for that tiny crying creature who had my eyes, my mouth, my hair. I lurved my daughter, my Ava. I looved her. I lurfed her.

He grunts. "Really? No one wanted them to be together. None of the gods approved. Who'd love the kind of the underworld?" "The right person.

It seemed everyone knew their place in it, but I was in the mood where I would rather be alone and look a houseplants.

The whole world had given up on love anyway and clung instead to its malformed cousins: lust, narcissism, self-interest.

It's a myth that grief makes you closer.

History repeats itself,” you sang. I wonder if that’s true. If there’s a hurt that’s buried in us, maybe it keeps fi nding its way through.

No puedes estar seguro de cómo va a resultar, incluso si lo haces todo bien. Las cosas se vuelven en tu contra, la vida lo hace.

We were here. Our lives matter.

There are two most important things in the world - being in danger, and being saved.

How foolish it was to love someone who didn’t love you back.

show me all the parts of you that you do not love so i know where to begin.

After sex, after coffee, after everything there is to be said -- The hovering and beautiful alphabet as we form our first words after making love. And somehow I'm still alive.

I want people to know me, but if anyone could look inside of me, if they saw that everything I feel is not what it's supposed to be, I don't know what would happen.

You have already captured my heart, body, and soul, Ava. I have no clue when it started, but at some point, my possessiveness and obsessiveness with you turned into this inferno of emotions where I was prepared to lose you if it meant protecting you. That’s when I realized I was in love with everything about you, whether it’s your obsession with pink, candy floss, or cheesy books and films. The lack of you has stripped my world of color and made me realize you’re my sole light in the darkness. It’s why I killed for you and would do it again in a heartbeat. I’d kill everyone if it meant I’d get to keep you. Perhaps that’s not the healthiest form of love, but it’s all I have. The heart you slowly awakened is entirely yours to do with as you please.

It was her favorite story, that she remembers, but she would be hard-pressed to retell it now, faithfully, as it had been told to her. All she could recall were frayed, sleep-watered images of a forgotten castle in the middle of a wild forest, stone statues, crimson roses, and a dark, animal presence never seen, but which stained her memory of the tale, even past its edges to the daylight after.

Thinking of her was always like this: a rush of fondness, and then a bolt of fear. Love poems never seemed to include this thread of terror. Was he uniquely ill-disposed to this sentiment, too uneasy, too anxious for the act of loving without reserve? Or was the object of his affection uniquely vulnerable?

He always called me Daughter. It was to distinguish me from his sister Ava. I loved being called Daughter. It sounded so possessive, and to be possessed when you are a child is just a wonderful feeling. It makes you feel safe. It makes you feel loved.

I love you, you know.” Viviane let the words hang in the air between them for a moment, like a sweet pink cloud. Then she inhaled the words in whole, turned them over in her mouth, relished their solidity on her tongue.

If you let lesser people determine your self-worth, you'll never reach higher than limited imagination. He leaned forward, expression intense. You don't have to work overtime to get people to love you, Ava. Love isn't earned, it's given.

Because what I admired most about Ava was also what I hated about her. Darkness craves light as much as it wants to destroy it, and here, in this ballroom, with her in my arms and my cock straining against my zipper, that had never been more clear. I hated how much I wanted her, and I hated that she wasn’t smart enough to run away from me while she still had a chance. Though let’s be honest, it was already too late. She was mine. She just didn’t know it yet. I hadn’t known it myself until I saw her in Colton’s arms and every instinct raged at me to tear her away. To claim what belonged to me.

I’ll never stop loving you hard. It’ll only get harder because every day that passes we create more memories. Memories I’ll treasure, not memories I want to forget. My mind if being filled with beautiful images of us, and they are replacing a history that lingers. They’re chasing away my past, Ava. I need them. I need you.

i'm so hooked on how your mind works, on what you notice, on everything that excites you. i'm so caught up in how you see the world, how you see everything and still offer up your love for all to take it. you give me a glimpse of your heart and i can't tell you how much you turn me on.

You guys know I love you, right?" I glance between them, knowing they'll freak, but it has to be said. They look at each other, exchanging a look of alarm, both of them wondering what could've possibly happened to the girl they once pegged as the Ice Queen. "Um, okay..." Haven says, shaking her head. But I just smile and grasp them both to me, squeezing them tightly as I whisper to Miles, "Whatever you do don't stop acting or singing, it's going to bring you great happiness." And before he can respond, I've moved on to Haven, knowing I have to get this over with and quick, so I can get Damen to Ava's, but determined to find a way to urge her to love herself more, and that Josh is worth hanging on to for however long it lasts. "You have so much value," I tell her. "So much to give--I just wish you could see how bright your star truly does shine." "Um, gag!" she says, laughing as she untangles herself from my grip. "Are you okay?

In Valiente's world," Eden wrote,"Love is never consummated, but remains a figment of the hero's own imagination. In preferring dreams to reality, the hero dooms himself. He would rather risk a physical death than the death of his beloved illusion.

Yearning is a red-haired girl sitting on the hood of her silver sedan, reading about Marilyn Monroe. A cherry orchard at night, houselights in the distance. It's the painstaking neatness of a paint-by-number sunset, a yellowed letter held between graceful fingers, a cautious step into the sun-filled lobby of a famous hotel. It's the way I feel every time I think about Ava.

Ava.” Alex’s voice cracked. Red rimmed his eyes, and I could’ve sworn he was on the verge of crying. But this was Alex. He didn’t cry. He wasn’t capable of it. “Sweetheart, please. Tell me what I have to do. I’ll do anything.” “I don’t know if there’s anything you can do,” I whispered. “I’m sorry.

What defines a romance? All scholars seem to converge on a single point: it is a story that must have a happy ending. And why is that? I say, it is because a romance is a belief in the impossible: that anything ends happily. For the only true end is death - and in this way, is romance not a rebuke of mortality? When love is here, I am not. When love is not, I am gone. Perhaps a romance is a story with no end at all; where the end is but a wardrobe with a false back, leading to stranger and more merciful words. From an epistemological theory of romance by Dr. Edmund Huber, collected in the Llyrian Journal of Literary Criticism, 199 AD

Drunk," she said. "Shrew," he replied. "Kids!" Michael held up his hands in a T shape. "Time out." Ava shot Kaleb a dirty look and left the kitchen. Michael followed. He didn't look back. "Why don't you tell her how you really feel?" I asked Kaleb when they were gone. "I have from the beginning." Kaleb put his arms on the table and propped his chin on his fist, gazing at me. "Kind of like I'm about to tell you that I might be in love with you." "Really?" I laughed. "Because of all of our deep conversations and the quality time we've spent together? Or was it just love at first sight?" "Something like that," he said, teasing.

Ava, se você for ouvir tudo que as pessoas esperam de você, vai viver a vida que elas querem. Várias pessoas vão achar que você é só músculo e nenhum cérebro, mas você tem de se perguntar se isso é real. A impressão que elas têm de você não é a verdade. Não é o respeito delas que vai fazer você melhor ou pior! O que os outros acham de você não a define, e sim como você se vê, a forma como pensa de si mesma.

I drifted lower, adjusting my position so I could squeeze her ass. Hard. “Your ass is mine…” I reached around and parted her thighs, sliding my fingers past her slippery folds. She was so wet they were drenched within seconds. “And your pussy is mine. Every inch of you belongs to me, and if you ever let another man touch you—” My other hand closed around her throat. “He’ll end up in pieces, and you’ll end up tied to my bed and fucked in every hole until my name is the only one you remember. Do you understand?” Her cunt clenched around my fingers. “Yes.” “Say it. Who do you belong to?” “You,” Ava whispered. “I belong to you.

Mind if I join the fun?” I hauled Liam up by his collar, my lip curling at the sight of his watering eyes and bleeding nose, and socked him in the gut. “That’s for calling her a slut.” Another blow to the jaw. “That’s for holding her against her will.” A third hit to his already-suffering nose. “That’s for cheating on her.” I continued my blows, letting the fire wash over me until Liam was unconscious and Ava had to drag me off him. “Alex, stop. You’ll kill him!” I adjusted my shirtsleeves, breathing hard. “Is that supposed to deter me?

Some curses fade and leave nothing but the faintest mark, a tea stain on watered silk. There are those that are so malevolent that, upon defeat, explode in a fiery burst of sulfurous flames, burning everything they touch as they die. Others dissolve like morning mist in the brightness of the midday sun. Some cannot be defeated at all, but feed upon the energy spent trying to vanquish it, growing more and more potent with each failed attempt. And then there are those ancient curses with deceptively simple antidotes that shatter like jagged shards of a vast mirror. These curses may be broken, but never completely destroyed, sharp slivers of light distorted.

Do you feel that?’ He flattens my palms on his chest and holds them there firmly. ‘It was made to love you, Ava. For too long it was useless, redundant, not required. Now it’s gone into overdrive. It swells with happiness when I look at you. It splinters with pain when we fight. And it beats wildly when I make love to you. Maybe I go overboard with my love, but that’s never going to change. I’ll love you this fiercely until the day I die, baby. Children or not.’‘Do you feel that?’ He flattens my palms on his chest and holds them there firmly. ‘It was made to love you, Ava. For too long it was useless, redundant, not required. Now it’s gone into overdrive. It swells with happiness when I look at you. It splinters with pain when we fight. And it beats wildly when I make love to you. Maybe I go overboard with my love, but that’s never going to change. I’ll love you this fiercely until the day I die, baby...

Because none of them are you. I…” Alex’s throat flexed with a hard swallow. The nervous expression returned. “I didn’t want to admit it, even to myself, but—” “No.” My heart broke into a gallop. I knew what he would say next, and I was nowhere near ready to hear it. “Don’t.” “Ava, I love you.” His eyes flickered with emotion, and my chest squeezed until I thought it would burst. “When you told me you loved me, I didn’t say it back because I didn’t feel like I deserved your love. You didn’t know the truth about my plan yet, and I didn’t think…fuck.” He rubbed the back of his neck, looking uncharacteristically flustered. “This wasn’t how I’d planned to say it,” he muttered. “But it’s true. And maybe I still don’t deserve you, but I’m willing to work at it until I do.

I arrived next to them right as she laughed at something he said. It rang through the air like silver bells, and the tic in my jaw pulsed harder. He didn’t deserve her laugh. “Something funny?” I asked, masking my ire with an expression of cool indifference. Surprise and wariness flared in Ava’s eyes at the sight of me. Good. She should be wary. She should be fucking home, safe and sound, instead of dancing with a manwhore like Colton and letting him put his hands all over her. “I was just telling her a joke.” Colton chuckled but shot me a warning look that said, Why are you cockblocking, man? He was lucky if all I did was cockblock. I was tempted to break every bone in his hand for touching her like that. “You mind? We’re in the middle of a dance.” “Actually, it’s my turn.” I maneuvered myself between them and pulled him off her with a little more force than necessary. Colton flinched. “You have to leave the gala early. Business calls.

The year was 1952.” I clear my throat and look down at my paper. “It was summer, and Frank Sinatra was on the radio. Lana Turner and Ava Gardner were the starlets of the day. Stormy was eighteen. She was in the marching band, she was voted Best Legs, and she always had a date on Saturday night. On this particular night, she was on a date with a boy named Walt. On a dare, she went skinny-dipping in the town lake. Stormy never could turn down a dare.” Mr. Perelli laughs and says, “That’s right, she never could.” Other people murmur in agreement, “She never could.” “A farmer called the police, and when they shined their lights on the lake, Stormy told them to turn around before she would come out. She got a ride home in a police car that night.” “Not the first time or the last,” someone calls out, and everyone laughs, and I can feel my shoulders start to relax. “Stormy lived more life in one night than most people do their whole lives. She was a force of nature. She taught me that love--” My eyes well up and I start over. “Stormy taught me that love is about making brave choices every day. That’s what Stormy did. She always picked love; she always picked adventure. To her they were one and the same. And now she’s off on a new adventure, and we wish her well.

I wanted to be a sex goddess. And you can laugh all you want to. The joke is on me, whether you laugh or not. I wanted to be one -- one of them. They used to laugh at Marilyn when she said she didn't want to be a sex-goddess, she wanted to be a human being. And now they laugh at me when I say, "I don't want to be a human being; I want to be a sex-goddess." That shows you right there that something has changed, doesn't it? Rita, Ava, Lana, Marlene, Marilyn -- I wanted to be one of them. I remember the morning my friend came in and told us that Marilyn had died. And all the boys were stunned, rigid, literally, as they realized what had left us. I mean, if the world couldn't support Marilyn Monroe, then wasn't something desperately wrong? And we spent the rest of the goddamned sixties finding out what it was. We were all living together, me and these three gay boys that adopted me when I ran away, in this loft on East Fifth Street, before it became dropout heaven -- before anyone ever said "dropout" -- way back when "commune" was still a verb? We were all -- old-movie buffs, sex-mad -- you know, the early sixties. And then my friend, this sweet little queen, he came in and he passed out tranquilizers to everyone, and told us all to sit down, and we thought he was just going to tell us there was a Mae West double feature on somewhere -- and he said -- he said -- "Marilyn Monroe died last" -- and all the boys were stunned -- but I -- I felt something sudden and cold in my solar plexus, and I knew then what I wanted to do with my life. I wanted to be the next one. I wanted to be the next one to stand radiant and perfected before the race of man, to shed the luminosity of my beloved countenance over the struggles and aspirations of my pitiful subjects. I wanted to give meaning to my own time, to be the unattainable luring love that drives men on, the angle of light, the golden flower, the best of the universe made womankind, the living sacrifice, the end! Shit!