“The love stories sold us the wrong thing. The best kind of love doesn‘t happen on moonlit walks and romantic vacations. It happens in between the folds of everyday life.”

“As it turns out, you can‘t outrun who you are.”

“The bad are the few, but often they shout louder than the many. Don‘t mistake silence for weakness.”

“Torturing and killing small animals, pets especially, is experimentation in controlling and killing another living thing for pure pleasure. It is practice, the last step before graduating to humans.”

“Sometimes people think if they love a broken person enough, they can be what finally repairs them, but the problem with that is the other person just ends up broken, too.”

“the greatest indicator of life span wasn‘t genetics, diet, or the amount of daily exercise, as many had suspected. It was lung capacity.”

It‘s not the book, it‘s me. The book was filled with twists and turns and I loved how the chapters alternated to the different characters‘ point of view. I gave this book a so-so rating because I typically find things to be a bit farfetched when it involves children and violence.

“There's an old saying: The first lie wins. It's not referring to the little white kind that tumble out with no thought; it refers to the big one. The one that changes the game. The one that is deliberate.”

“But more and more, I wonder about his past. I wonder what he has done and what he is capable of doing.”

“I have made an incredibly bad judgment call. I have underestimated an extremely dangerous person. And now I will pay the ultimate price.”

“She‘s got what you might call an elastic relationship with the truth… When she doesn‘t like the reality of things, she finds a reality she prefers.”

“There‘s no point in regretting something that can‘t be changed. Regret is a wasted emotion.”

“I would not attempt to guess at the nature of true love, except to say that when I was immersed in it—swimming through it, breathing it in, holding that breath, exhaling—in those short, extraordinary days and nights I shared with your father, true love was absolutely clear to me. Jack was clear to me. Jack was me, and I was him, and you, sweet child, are now us both.”

“Reading lets us live in someone else‘s shoes. Literature builds bridges; it makes our world larger, not smaller.”

“The thinking that women of all shapes and sizes can be beautiful is still hugely problematic, because it is predicated on the idea that the most important thing a woman has to offer the world is her appearance. Men are raised to worry about their legacies, not their upper arm and thigh fat, stretch marks, crows-feet, saggy elbows, ugly armpits, thin eyelashes, and normal-smelling genitals.”

“Women got that feeling about him, that funny one we all get when we know something isn't right, but we don't know how to politely extricate ourselves from the situation without escalating the threat of violence or harassment. That is not a skill women are taught, the same way men are not taught that it is okay to leave a woman alone if what she wants is to be left alone.”

“I love my Mother Country, and I love my family, and I always will. I just wish, at the second-darkest moment of my life, they'd been there for me too…
And I believe they'll look back one day and wish they had too.”

“How segmented life is. It splits so easily into friendships and addresses and life phases that feel endless but never, never last.”

“Tell a lie once and your truth becomes questionable.”

“My truth is not the same as yours because we don‘t experience life in the same way.”

“Sometimes, what doesn‘t kill you simply doesn‘t kill you, and you spend all your time wishing it had.”

“She who only looks inward will find only chaos, and she who looks outward with the eyes of critical judgment will find only flaws. But she who looks with the eyes of compassion and understanding will see complex souls, suffering and soaring, navigating life as best they can.”

Michelle Williams did a phenomenal job narrating the book, it really felt like Britney was retelling her story. I couldn‘t stop listening and was so upset when it ended! I‘m a huge fan of reading physical books, but in this case you have to go with the audiobook. It‘s an experience that shouldn‘t be missed.

“She knows that it‘s not necessarily the ones who seem different that you need to be afraid of—it‘s the ones who can carry off normal without anyone suspecting a thing.”

“The average human spends 33 years of their life asleep… don‘t you ever wonder what you might have done when you‘re asleep?”

“That‘s what it takes to catch your prey. Patience. We can all learn a lot from the soft-shelled turtle.”

“Even a prison becomes comforting if it‘s the only thing you know.”

“Like those before him, he holds on to the hope of a miracle. He doesn't realise that, to them, he is not human. He is an everyday, ten-a-penny object…”

“It was easier to believe she was lying than that lightning loves a scarred tree.”

“There‘s a difference between taking care of someone because you love them and taking care of someone because you want them to love you.”

“In that moment, reading those passages, I understood completely how some of the Lackses could believe, without doubt, that Henrietta had been chosen by the Lord to become an immortal being. If you believe the Bible is the literal truth, the immortality of Henrietta's cells makes perfect sense.”

“He has no idea, this is just the beginning.”

“We take for granted what we become used to. Human nature.”

“Never take anything you haven‘t earned, my father used to say. You always end up paying for it one way or another.”

“Like a lion hunting her prey, she waited for the lucky Stanford winner to reveal her good fortune.”

“A mother‘s heart breaks a million ways in her lifetime”

“Because while you can reinvent yourself, you can‘t outrun yourself. As a woman once reminded her a long time ago, the common denominator in all the terrible things that have happened to you is you.”

“Sometimes you can‘t simultaneously be smart, brave, and careful. Sometimes you need to choose one.”

“Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.” -Voltaire

“At night, from the inside,… the only thing you can see is your own reflection.”

“… language doesn‘t work to manipulate people into believing things they don‘t want to believe; instead, it gives them license to believe ideas they‘re already open to.”

“The lowest point of your life can lead to the highest.”

“Every action you take is a vote for the type of person you wish to become. No single instance will transform your beliefs, but as the votes build up, so does the evidence of your new identity.”

“After all, everyone‘s entitled to be the hero of their own story. So I must be permitted to be the hero of mine. Even though I‘m not. I‘m the villain.”

“You could drown in two inches of water. Maybe grief was the same.”

“Ain't no good in using anger just to lash. You pray for it to blow up a storm that's going to flush out the truth.”

“A woman who is full of herself knows and trusts herself enough to say and do what must be done. She lets the rest burn.”

“No matter what happened to you, no matter what horrors you endured when you were taken away, you will always be my pretty little girl.”

“Love doesn‘t require a future.”

“Unexpressed emotions will never die. They are buried alive, and will come forth later, in uglier ways.” -Sigmund Freud