Fangirl Quotes

“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—’”

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

“‘Months are different in college,’ Levi said, ‘especially freshman year. Too much happens. Every freshman month equals six regular months—they’re like dog months.’”

“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.”

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

“‘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.’”

“Wren shoved off the counter, shaking her head. ‘Oh, you hate everything. You hate change. If I didn’t drag you along behind me, you’d never get anywhere.’”

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

“‘I know what it’s like to be distracted. To seek out distractions. To exhaust yourself doing every other little thing rather than face a blank page.’”

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

“‘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.’”

“‘That wasn’t just a kiss, Cather. There was no just.’”

“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.)”

“If we stop to apologize and forgive each other every time we step on each other’s toes, we’ll never have time to be friends.”

“‘Think about it, Cath. That’s what makes a god—or a mother. There’s nothing more intoxicating than creating something from nothing. Creating something from yourself.’”

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

“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.”

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

“‘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.’”