Best 22 quotes in «all the bright places quotes» category

An hour later, I check my Facebook page. Violet has written: “Arrange whatever pieces come your way.” My skin starts to burn. She’s quoting Virginia Woolf back to me. My pulse has tripled its pace. Shit, I think. That’s all the Virginia Woolf I know. I do a quick internet search, looking for just the right response. Suddenly I wish I’d paid more attention to Virginia Woolf, a writer I’ve never had much use for until now. Suddenly I wish I’d done nothing but study her for all of my seventeen years.

Besides, in that instant we went plowing through the guardrail, my words died too.

By the time I get to U.S. Geography, I’ve almost convinced myself this world exists. Until I see Ryan Cross, all gold, flowing, his hand on the back of Violet’s chair as if he’s the host at the Macaroni Grill. He is smiling at her and talking, and she is smiling at him with her mouth closed, gray-green eyes wide and serious behind her glasses, and just like that, I am Indiana-born Theodore Finch in a pair of secondhand boots. Guys like Ryan Cross have a way of reminding you who you are, even when you don’t want to remember.

I don't know what brings you up here, but to me the town looks prettier and the people look nicer and even the worst of them look almost kind.

I am carried off. We yield to this slow flood.... In and out, we are swept; ...we can not step outside its sinuous, its hesitating, its abrupt, its perfectly encircling walls.

I'd like to live in a world created by Theodore Finch - Violet Markey

He says, “I do my best thinking at night when everyone else is sleeping. No interruptions. No noise. I like the feeling of being awake when no one else is.” I wonder if he sleeps at all.

I don’t need to worry that Finch and I never filmed our wanderings. It’s okay that we didn’t collect souvenirs or that we never had time to pull it all together in a way that made sense to anyone else but us. The thing I realize is that it’s not what you take, it’s what you leave.

It takes many, many coats to cover the red. No matter what I do, it seeps right through, like the walls are bleeding.

I like to think that the colors and sounds and words have nothing to do with him, that they’re all me and my own brilliant, complicated, buzzing, humming, soaring roaring diving, godlike brain. Violet says, “Are you okay now?” Her hair is windblown and her cheeks are flushed. Whether she likes it or not, she seems happy. I take a good long look at her. I know life well enough to know you can’t count on things staying around or standing still, no matter how much you want them to. You can’t stop people from dying. You can’t stop them from going away. You can’t stop yourself from going away either. I know myself well enough to know that no one else can keep you awake or keep you from sleeping. That’s all on me too. But man, I like this girl.

I like writing, but I like a lot of things. Maybe out of those things, I'm best at writing. Maybe it's what I like best of all. Maybe it's where I've always felt most at home. Or maybe the writing part of me is over. Maybe there's something else I'm supposed to do instead. I don't know.

I'm not a vain person, but I am human...

I think about Finch and Sir Patrick Moore and black holes and blue holes and bottomless bodies of water and exploding stars and event horizons, and a place so dark that light can't get out once it's in.

Never bullshit a bullshitter.

The Parents, as my mother and father refer to Mr. Finch and Mrs. Finch, are insisting it was an accident, which, I guess, means we're free to mourn him out in the open in a normal, healthy, unstigmatised way. No need to be ashamed or embarrassed since suicide isn't involved.

Soon I have a pile of mean words and unpleasantness beside my shoe. Dec grabs them and adds them to her own pile. When she’s finished with a book, she tosses it aside, and it’s then I get it: it’s the mean parts she wants. She is collecting all the unhappy, mad, bad, unpleasant words and keeping them for herself. “Why are we doing this, Dec?” “Because they shouldn’t be in there mixed with the good. They like to trick you.

The only thing I leave alone is the ceiling, because white contains all the wavelengths of the visible spectrum at full brightness. Okay, this is technically true of white light and not white paint, but I don’t care. I tell myself that all the colors are there anyway, and this gives me an idea. I think of writing it as a song, but instead I sign onto the computer and send a message to Violet. You are all the colors in one, at full brightness.

The Nest Houses aren’t there. It’s dark by the time I stop in downtown New Harmony, with its brightly painted buildings, and ask everyone I can find about where the houses have gone. Most people haven’t heard of them, but one old man tells me, “Sorry you came all this way. I’m afraid they been ate up by weather and the elements.” Just like all of us.

The room is just as I left it, and I think maybe it isn’t the room that’s different. Maybe it’s me.

The thing I don’t say is: I want to stay alive. The reason I don’t say it is because, given that fat folder in front of him, he’d never believe it. And here’s something else he’d never believe—I’m fighting to be here in this shitty, messed-up world. Standing on the ledge of the bell tower isn’t about dying. It’s about having control. It’s about never going to sleep again.

Were you planning to jump off?" “Not on pizza day. Never on pizza day, which is one of the better days of the week.” I should mention that I am a brilliant deflector.

We go so slow that cars and trucks are speeding past and honking. One guy yells at us out his window and flips us off. It’s taking all I have not to slam my foot against the gas pedal, but then I’m used to slowing down so that everyone else can catch up.