Cather Avery Quotes

“‘I object to every single thing you just said.’”

“Cath felt like she was swimming in words. Drowning in them, sometimes.”

“‘The whole point of fanfiction,’ she said, ‘is that you get to play inside somebody else’s universe. Rewrite the rules. Or bend them.’”

“In new situations, all the trickiest rules are the ones nobody bothers to explain to you. (And the ones you can’t google.)”

“‘You’re a sad little hermit, and it creeps me out. So get dressed. We’re going bowling.’”

“Knowing they were in the same city again made the missing him flare up inside her. In her stomach. Why were people always going on and on about the heart? Almost everything Levi happened in Cath’s stomach.”

“‘You don’t get to be the mother if you show up after the kids are already grown up. She’s like all those animals at the end of the story who show up to eat the Little Red Hen’s bread.’”

“In some cases, she was actively trying not to make friends, though she usually stopped short of being rude. (Uptight, tense, and mildly misanthropic? Yes. Rude? No.)”

“She called her dad instead. He sounded tired, but he wasn’t trying to replace the stairs with a water slide, so that was an improvement.”

“‘I don’t trust anybody. Not anybody. And the more that I care about someone, the more sure I am they’re going to get tired of me and take off.’”

“To really be a nerd, she’d decided, you had to prefer fictional worlds to the real one.”

“‘People are going to feel sorry for me, and I won’t ever have any normal relationships—and it’s always going to be because I didn’t have a mother. Always. That’s the ultimate kind of broken.’”

“Cath could already feel the anxiety starting to tear her stomach into nervous little pieces. ‘It’s not just that…. I don’t like new places. New situations. There’ll be all those people, and I won’t know where to sit—I don’t want to go.’”

“‘You can stay in this world, this world you love, as long as you want, as long as you keep thinking of new stories—’”