Brenna Yovanoff Quotes

The treachery of demons is nothing compared to the betrayal of an angel.

I wanted to tell her that I loved her, and not in the complicated way I loved our parents, but in a simple way I never had to think about. I loved her like breathing.

‎The simple truth is that you can understand a town. You can know and love and hate it. You can blame it, resent it, and nothing changes. In the end, you're just another part of it.

You asked about love. I don't know about love, Daphne. I just know I don't want anything but you. I don't want to anywhere but with you.

Do you really want to know where we come from?" she said. "In every century, in every country, they'll call us something different. They'll say we're ghosts, angels, demons, elemental spirits, and giving us a name doesn't help anybody. When did a name change what someone is?

Once, my mother told a whole host of angels that she’d rather die than go back to a man she didn’t love.

Intention is one of the most powerful forces there is. What you mean when you do a thing will always determine the outcome. The law creates the world.

Sometimes this was just the way the game ended. Sometimes you did your best, and it all went straight to hell anyway.

The simple truth is that you can understand the way you are. You can know and love and hate it. You can blame it, resent it, and nothing changes. In the end, you're just a part of it.

Love is when you care more about something else than you do about yourself.

I wanted it in the way you sometimes want to jump into very cold water, even though you know it won't feel good. I wanted to go numb. To see what it felt like to be someone else.

Tender," she said again. "Tender is kind and gentle. It's also sore, like the skin around an injury.

All my life, I've understood the nature of where I come from, but I never thought it might be wicked until now.

My father gave me a ruined boy to compensate for the fact that he does not love me. The boy is fragile, broken—broke himself—broke everything. I asked him why he did it. He said because the world was unlivable. He said it was unlovable, but I think he meant himself. I think he meant that loneliness is sometimes painful. I curl against him, tuck my head beneath his chin and listen to his heart. It says stay and wait. It says regret. He knows what it is to want love, a love so fierce you grow roots. I hear his heart say please. He went looking for angels and found me instead, girl of the sorrows, sad but not sorry. I waited for a sign, a star to fall. He reached for a knife and drew branches.

All great acts are ruled by intention. What you mean is what you get.

The Cutter leaned toward me, resting his forehead against mine. 'Fool me once,' he whispered, 'shame on you.' He pressed the bridge of his nose against mine, his breath burning the back of my throat. His voice was rough and furious. 'Fool me twice, and I will cut out your fucking throat.

In his youth, he was electrified. The stars were moving in his bloodstream. He would not have been cowed by the customs of an earthly monarch. When he loved, it was with a heat and a desperation that he carried like a sword. He loved in the way that Greeks burned cities.

People do that sometimes. Change.

My father's answer was revenge-has always been revenge-and the outcome was just, but not better. Nothing is fixed.

He knew how useless words could be. How even when you wanted more than anything just to hear someone say they understood, it didn’t make you feel better. Not really.

You can't keep acting like this," Lillian says, and for the first time in months, it's like she's actually trying to be nice. "Tragedy isn't this evil thing that came from outer space. It's just there, you know. Along with everything else.

They?" he said, sounding apprehensive. "Me. They're like me." "Don't be a jackass," Roswell said, but not meanly. "No one's like you.

Let me tell you a little bit about demons. They love pain and other people’s misery. They lie when it suits them and don’t see anything wrong with it. They corrupt and kill and destroy, all without conscience. You just don’t have the capacity for something as honorable as loving another person.

When did a name ever change what someone is?

I'm not normal, Tate." "I know." Her hand was working its way under my shirt, then touching my skin, sliding over my chest and stomach. "Does this feel good?" I closed my eyes and nodded. "You're normal enough.

The fact is, the contest has always been invulnerability, and even when you win, you still lose.

You're terribly selfish, you know. I've loved you so long, and it was never dear or precious to you. I might as well have not loved you at all.

All I want is for you to stand here and watch the people you love be horribly mutilated. Is that too much to ask?

Goodbye," she said. When I didn't say it back, she rested her hand on the top of my head. The weight was strange and gentle. "I love you," she said. "And when I tell you goodbye, I don't mean forever or for long. Just that I'm going home now, and so are you.

People make decisions, and maybe you don't always agree, but those choices are still their own.

That was the thing about being bereaved. People were overcome with sympathy. They did things for you without even considering whether or not it was the right thing to do.

I've never been impulsive. It's always been in my nature to consider things carefully and then decide upon the best solution. Except, sometimes the circumstances change. Sometimes things get so complicated and so bad that your nature just doesn't matter anymore.

He smiles an honest smile for the first time, and the difference is hard to describe but easy to recognize.

Because I was conceived and born and I grew up. I'm breathing and my heart is beating and as much as it hurts ― as much searing, monumental pain it causes me ― I have to exist.

It’s not the wisest thing - love - but when it happens, there’s not a lot you can do to stop it. Sometimes you just have to soldier on through.

It's strange, but seeing something broken is somehow worse when you can tell that it used to be beautiful.

For the first time in maybe my whole life, I feel dangerous and magical, like a dragon or a mermaid. A fury, standing there with my half-gone grape slush and my jaw clenched, ready for whatever comes next.

He is broken in three ways, sometimes four. I count them. -He believes himself to be human, but is not actually. At least not anymore. This is similar to the way he believes himself to be alive. -He has a grim affinity for drugs. This comes with no caveat and no parentheses. This is just a fact of life. -He is doggedly unhappy and once decided to kill himself. Sadly, he has not really stopped. -On certain occasions when these first three things have ceased to be bad enough, he loves me. The other sins are commonplace, forgivable under a big enough umbrella. This fourth is irrevocable. Unconscionable. In a word, it is utterly damning.

Don’t you ever just have those days where even if you don’t really like someone, you might as well hang out with them because right then, it’s better than being alone?

The world is full of unused corners.

We lay on the grass beside the cemetery fence, kissing and shivering. Her teeth started to chatter and I pulled her against me, which made me feel like a superhero for no apparent reason.

Whatever they said, whatever they told you about yourself, it’s not true

Her voice was like loneliness. It was regret. She sang about a past you couldn't get out of and didn't want.

how awful to never be allowed to fail

Her smile doesn't look any more real than mine. I wonder if she has to practice too.

Is it hypocritical to love a person and still find fault with their actions?" -The Morrigan

I just want that, the way I feel when you kiss me. Just having it makes all the bad things better.

Their lead guitar sounded like what would happen if someone wedged a traffic accident into a blender.

Your gods don't know you exist. And that's okay.

Once, I ordered two thousand lady bugs from the local garden center and set them loose in the atrium. I sprinkled marigold seeds in the ficus planters and put gold fish in the lobby fountain. These are things I did with no consequences, no repercussions. My nineteen detentions were for smart answers and missed homework. There is no equivalent punishment for making the world a stranger place.

Her eyes are so wild and bright they almost look like stars.

Truman Flynn is a piece of paper in my coat pocket. He is a memory of water and of loss, his hand sliding free from mine, no way to hold on.

Take your necklace off." "Why?" "Because if you don't, I can't kiss you.

I had only to remember that centuries before, men fell in battle for the daughter of Troy, that passions carried greater weight than decorum. It took so little to prove that human life and property are devastatingly temporary. All she had to do was lie down for a prince. They burned the city to the ground.

Kissing him is like the wildest, most thrilling thing that has ever happened to me. It's like diving into the deep end over and over. He touches the curve of my lip with his tongue, just once, so softly, and I think the whole world is ending, the sudden warmth of his mouth jolting through me like a shock. I hold on like I'm falling off the top of a tall cliff or I'm lost at sea, like he's the only thing solid in the whole tilting world.

You presume to name those who have no name. We are pandemonium and disaster. We are the dancing, gibbering horror of the world.

She was the purest, biggest truth.

Our lives were limitless and unknowable, not perfect, but ours.

You asked me about love. I don't know about love, Daphne. I just know I don't want anything but you. I don't want to be anywhere but with you.

Sometimes it doesn't matter how dark the world gets. You can be saved by the smallest thing.

The things I had were mine and some of them were broken, but they were real. They were so very far from nothing.

When I press my forehead to his back, the shape of his pain is alluring, almost visible. It forms him, tells him to protect himself, makes him everything he is. He needs to keep it.

Suddenly, I understand what Petra has always been trying to tell me. The whole time she was mumbling her litany of stories, she was always only telling me one thing. Love is when you care more about something else than you do about yourself.

From the window, I watch the city and the freeway. In the distance, the sky-rises look like mystic spires, unbearably close and far. I want to pick them up and eat them. I want to scream out loud sometimes, but I never do.

She bruised easily, in dark purple smudges like in blooming on tissue paper.

We're literal people, you and me. Whatever the most obvious interpretation is, that's our truth.

He was a whole mess of almosts, of mismatched pieces.

I was too little to think a miracle could be anything but good.

Sometimes you do things that feel bad later just so you don't feel worse right now.

The world is under no obligation to be sane or orderly.

I assumed it was a matter of time. One day I’d meet someone who counteracted my chemical structure. We would compete for supremacy, collide until one of us was forced to yield, or else go forth together, suspended in eternal stalemate. But my model is inaccurate. The poets are wrong. The opposite of ice isn’t fire. It’s water.

What's wrong?" His voice was loud, so sharp that he sounded angry. I knew I should be careful, keep the secret, but I was too far gone to talk around it. My chest was working in huge spasms and I could barely breathe. "I kissed her." "And then you went into anaphylactic shock?" I closed my eyes and let the rain patter against my face through the open window "She has her tongue pierced.

I never told her, but the Queen of Hearts charm always reminded me of her, even when she was alive. The way that all ways were Lillian’s ways, and how in the story the queen is unpredictable and kind of scary, but even when she throws a tantrum or threatens to cut off Alice’s head, she never really means it.

It was completely unshocking that there were monsters in the world, secret rituals and underground burrows filled with the dead, when in my own way, I was secret and sort of monstrous too. It just didn’t show in the same way.

Intent matters. If you believe you're charmed, capable, likable, popular, then you are.

I walk the three blocks to the school slowly, like if I’m not careful of every step, every tiny movement, I will lose my grip on gravity and go flying up into the stratosphere.

Finny Boone is probably a sociopath. A big, lighter-stealing sociopath, but his eyes are steady and complicated.

The moon is full, and even the stars are scared of me.

The new mythology of love was that it bent to the fashion of the day, obligated to take the shape of doves, lilies, jewels. This is a lie. Love is sometimes as passionate as war.

I fell headfirst into a sinkhole of pretty things, and the world inside your eyelids is just as big as the one outside.

Don't listen. Whatever they said, whatever they told you about yourself, it's not true.

Sometimes being who you are - whoever you are - is hard. Sometimes, you can have it all together and still drive yourself crazy.

When he was done adding sloe gin and grenadine, Danny shoved the glass across the counter to Drew. "Try that and tell me what it needs." Drew took a sip, then coughed and set the glass down. "That's awful." Danny scowled and tossed a dripping tablespoon at him. "You're awful. I'm looking for constructive feedback, asshole. What does it need?" Drew threw the tablespoon back. "It needs to be taken out and shot." "Make your own damn drink, Mr. Mixology.

I want to be William Shakespeare and Galileo and Robert Frost. I want to be Sappho. I want to be Jane Austen. I want to be Holden Caulfield and Marilyn Monroe and Joan of Arc. I’m sad to think they came before me in history, they made their mark without me. But they were there. They happened.

I didn't know how to respond to that. There was something disturbing about being responsible for partially decayed girls going swimming.

The sound of her voice was painful. She screamed, sobbed, whispered Hallelujah. But she never sang it.

Why are you so determined to destroy yourself?" I say, and my voice is very small. "I don't know," he whispers back. "Why are you?

Don't take this the wrong way, but all my life you've been the weirdest person I've ever met. That doesn't make you not a real person. In fact, it makes you pretty goddamn specific.

If we were having this conversation, that meant something was either wrong with me, or it was wrong with everybody else, and I had a basic enough understanding of probability to know that the odds did not rest with an entire planet.

Lillian was always so good at treating everything like a test, like some kind of game where the prize was shiny and untouchable. Perfection. She wanted me to back off, butt out, stop trying to control her life. And she wanted me to save her.

Why does she always seem to think you drive like we're holding up a bank?" Roswell grinned and rolled his eyes, "Because that's what teenagers do, right? They also carve swastikas into their arms, steal prescription drugs from old people, and freebase cocaine. I need to institute a policy where she stops watching 60 Minutes and pretty much all public service announcements.

Are you waiting for someone to come and get you?” I whisper. I sound small and thirsty. He doesn’t answer. Instead, he bends his head and kisses me, just once, then let’s me go. When Connor would kiss Angelie in the halls last spring, he did it like he was trying to suck the chocolate off the outside of a Klondike bar. It could last for hours. This is more like seeing a star fall - thrilling and soundless and then over.

It wasn't like the other songs. There was no story, no conversation. This was just the feeling, without words or pictures, and it had nothing to do with Luther or his clean, stinging guitar. It was the sound of being outside, of being alien. It was the pulse that ran under everything and never let you forget that you were strange, that the world hurt just to touch.

Did you ever think about boys?' I say, staring up into the dark. 'There wasn't room,' she whispers, and her voice is unbelievably sad. 'At first, after Connor, I was just waiting. I was going to get a new boyfriend soon- as soon as I was prettier or better, more perfect. But after a while there was no room for anything else. If I though about kissing or sex, I just started feeling ugly, too awful for anything good.

Why are you here? I'm here because this is where my Mom's family is from and after my parents got divorced, she kept the house. Because I was conceived and born and grew up. I'm breathing and my heart is beating and as much as it hurts—as much searing, monumental pain as it causes me—I have to exist.

He understands me- how I am. If I forget to come up for air, he reminds me. If i get too literal or too focused, he doesn't take it personally. I'm better at loving him than anyone else, because he never makes me guess what he needs. And because he lets me.

There was so much about our past that I still didn't understand, and I wasn't one to tell the future. I could only tell the way the world worked. History was a tangled thing, people were resilient, and the one constant law of the world was that it would heal.

The way Lillian says it is hungry, like she’s waiting for something to be revealed, and I wonder if maybe that’s the real difference between us—that when she pulls back the curtain and stares into the blackness behind it, it’s just one more way of testing herself. Like some game you can never win, because even if you face all the shocking realities and the horrors of the world, once you’ve seen that kind of awfulness, you can never un-see it. You have to carry it around with you forever.

I looked at the ground and the dark, drizzling sky and pretty much anyplace that wasn't her. "I like you. A lot." When I finally glanced at her, my face was hot and it was hard to keep looking. She squinted up at me. Then she crossed her arms. "This is a really inappropriate place to be having this conversation." "I know. I like you anyway." Saying it a third time was like breaking some kind of spell. Her face went soft and far away. "Don't say that unless you mean it." "I don't say anything I don't mean.

There are all kinds of things that can scare you every day. What if someone you know gets cancer? What if something happens to you sister or your friends or your parents? And what if you get hit by a car crossing the street or the kids at school find out what an unnatural freak you are and what if you go too far out in the lake and the water is over your head and what if there's a fire or a war? And you can lie awake at night and worry about these things because it's scary and unpredictable, but it's REAL. It's possible." -Mackie Doyle, The Replacement