Jennifer Niven Quotes

“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.”

“I stand in front of the mirror and study my face.…It is the face of a sad, lonely girl something bad has happened to. I wonder if my face will ever look the same again, or if I’ll always see it in my reflection - Finch, Eleanor, loss, heartache, guilt, death.”

“I’ve got a map in my car that wants to be used, and I think there are places we can go that need to be seen. Maybe no one else will ever visit them and appreciate them or take the time to think they’re important, but maybe even the smallest places mean something.”

“I think of my own epitaph, still to be written, and all the places I’ll wander. No longer rooted, but gold, flowing. I feel a thousand capacities spring up in me.”

“The fact is, I was sick, but not in an easily explained flu kind of way. It’s my experience that people are a lot more sympathetic if they can see you hurting, and for the millionth time in my life I wish for measles or smallpox or some other recognizable disease just to make it simple for me and also for them.”

“She sets down the bucket and undoes the latch. For a few seconds, all she does is breathe in the scent of the flowers, and then she turns to me and, without a word, kisses me. When she pulls away, she says, ‘No more winter at all. Finch, you brought me spring.’”

“Which of my feelings are real? Which of the mes is me? There is only one me I’ve ever really liked, and he was good and awake as long as he could be.”

“Worthless. Stupid. These are the words I grew up hearing. They’re the words I try to outrun, because if I let them in, they might stay there and grow and fill me up and in, until the only thing left of me is worthless stupid worthless stupid worthless stupid freak. And then there’s nothing to do but run harder and fill myself with other words: This time will be different. This time, I will stay awake.”

“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, but it’s what you leave.”

“Maybe, if I wear the glasses long enough, I can be like her. I can see what she saw. I can be both of us at once so no one will have to miss her, most of all me.”

“We alternate choosing places to go, but we also have to be willing to go where the road takes us. This means the grand, the small, the bizarre, the poetic, the beautiful, the ugly, the surprising. Just like life.”

“You are all the colors in one, at full brightness.”

“‘You’ll be departing our…great state, and before…you do, you should…see it. You should…wander….’”

“Your hope lies in accepting your life as it now lies before you, forever changed. If you can do that, the peace you seek will follow. Forever changed. I am forever changed.”

“‘He’s a gentleman.’ There aren’t many people who would say this about me, but the great thing about this life of ours is that you can be someone different to everybody.”

“The walls are lined with school photos. Finch in kindergarten. Finch in middle school. He looks different every year, not just agewise but personwise. Class-clown Finch. Awkward Finch. Cocky Finch. Jock Finch.”

“You make me lovely, and it’s so lovely to be lovely to the one I love….”

“‘I’m broken, and no one can fix it. I’ve tried. I’m still trying. I can’t love anyone because it’s not fair to anyone who loves me back.’”

“‘Are you feeling okay?’ I try not to sound like the blaming girlfriend. Why won’t you spend time with me? Why won’t you call me back? Don’t you like me anymore?”

“Suddenly I’m having one of those moments that you have after losing someone - when you feel as if you’ve been kicked in the stomach and all your breath is gone, and you might never get it back. I want to sit down in the dirty, littered ground right now and cry until I can’t cry anymore.”