Amy Zhang Quotes

#1. She finally figure out that she, Liz Emerson, was the equal and opposite reaction. She was the consequence.

Amy Zhang

#2. Lesson learned: bad things happen to good people.

Amy Zhang

#3. In this moment, she realizes what death really means. It means that she will never catch them.

Amy Zhang

#4. She looked around and saw all of the broken things in her wake, and then she looked inside herself ans saw the spidering cracks from the weight of all the things she had done.

Amy Zhang

#5. I like water, though. I like the way it waits, and when you touch it, it both moves away and clings to your finger. I like the way it rises, like memory, or fear.

Amy Zhang

#6. Without each other, there wouldn't be much of a point, would there?

Amy Zhang

#7. Out of the seven billion people sharing the planet with her, not one of them knew what was going through her head. Not one of them knew she was lost. Not one of them asked.

Amy Zhang

#8. We fall asleep to fairy tales, and the world rotates and revolves and time passes and we grow up and we understand that they are false. There are not heroes and princesses and villains. It's not that easy.

Amy Zhang

#9. She wished to be happy, and fell asleep with an entire sky above her.

Amy Zhang

#10. She is human and bound by the same laws of nature - gravity, in particular - as everyone else. Try as she might, she will never grow wings.

Amy Zhang

#11. I could understand a world where she was in Nepal, though I couldn't figure out why she didn't text me back. I could understand a world where she was distant but not lost. I couldn't understand a world without her.

Amy Zhang

#12. They never talked about it, but they both knew what they feared. More than anything, they feared they wouldn't have each other someday.

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#13. There had been silent tears and ones that barely leaked out. There were tears that heaved from her in great sobs. They all slipped through my fingers when I tried to catch them, and they fell around her in oceans.

Amy Zhang

#14. Her world was almost beautiful. She didn't care that it was false.

Amy Zhang

#15. Whatever you do, whatever you redo, it all ends up here. Some things are just unavoidable. No matter how hard you try, the things meant to go to shit still go to shit. Terrible things happen, Micah, and you can't stop them. You just can't."

So you just do more terrible things.

Amy Zhang

#16. It wasn't the aloneness that Liz minded. It was the silence. It echoed.

Amy Zhang

#17. subsequently sentenced to five minutes on the Wall.

Amy Zhang

#18. She lives in a world made entirely of sky.

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#19. If there's one person in the world you should be with, there must be one person in the world you shouldn't be with.

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#20. And it was then that he began to fall in love with her for the second time... because he believed in broken things.

Amy Zhang

#21. He leans back in his chair and just looks at it all, the final diary of a dying girl.

Amy Zhang

#22. The world is so big and beautiful and infinite that we don't need to pretend

Amy Zhang

#23. Some people die because the world does not deserve them. Liz Emerson on the other hand, did not deserve the world.

Amy Zhang

#24. Liz looked back and counted the bodies, all those lives she had ruined simply by existing. So she chose to stop existing.

Amy Zhang

#25. He is rainwater and smoke and wishes. He is honey and wind and bitter as truth and sharp with hurting and endlessly, unbearably sweet. He is air, finally, endlessly

Amy Zhang

#26. No one is strong enough to hold back so many tears

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#27. Liz was afraid of silence, and she kept her fears clenched so tightly in her fists that they grew and grew and swallowed her whole.

Amy Zhang

#28. She was insane, and this was Janie. This was the Janie who loved fire and carried rocks. This was the Janie Vivian who trusted rarely but deeply, and hoped with everything she was. This was the Janie Vivian, who I had loved with every atom in every cell in my body before memory was relevant.

Amy Zhang

#29. But there was something terrifying taking over her thoughts, and it wouldn't leave. Out of seven billion sharing the planet with her, not one of them knew what was going through her head. Not one of them knew that she was lost. Not one of them asked.

Amy Zhang

#30. I put my hand in my pocket and squeeze my rocks and wonder if there is a word for the marks you get on your palm when you squeeze something so hard that the skin is on the verge of ripping.

Amy Zhang

#31. Funny things, aren't they? People. They only believed in what they could see. Appearances were all that mattered, and no one would ever care what she was like on the inside. No one cared that she was breaking apart.

Amy Zhang

#32. Stay alive.
But she doesn't want to. She doesn't want to.

Amy Zhang

#33. I do have a heart. A big, messy, bleeding-like-a-volcano heart. If you pulled it out of my chest, it would be covered in escaped butterflies and black holes and weeds that look like flowers.

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#34. We are nervous laughter and fast breath and faster heartbeats, alive alive alive.

Amy Zhang

#35. Purification. You burn everything, you burn and burn and burn, and you start over.

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#36. She was tired. Gravity pulled at her more aggressively than usual. When she closed her eyes, she could feel it, dragging her deeper, deeper. I would have pulled her back. I would have saved her from falling, but she didn't see my hand.

Amy Zhang

#37. In that moment, Liz Emerson felt that she was forever looking up at people who were much, much better than she could ever be, and the only thing she was really good at was pulling them down to her level.

Amy Zhang

#38. Well, hello, darling with the ocean eyes,
How many secrets keep us apart?
A sea of poems, a field of sighs,
Can I cross and return to the start?

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#39. They were catalysts, the fingers that tipped the first domino. They started things that grew into nothing things that were much greater than themselves. A touch, a nudge in the wrong direction, and everyone fell down.

Amy Zhang

#40. That's the truth, I guess. We don't catch moments in the passing. We don't catch them at all. We just reach and scramble and wish for fairy godmothers and Prince Charmings. It's too bad none of it is real. It really is too bad.

Amy Zhang

#41. There are no wicked queens or vengeful sorcerers, but that doesn't mean that there aren't bad people. There are. There are some truly, truly shitty people out there.

Amy Zhang

#42. Had the world always been like this? Why had it seemed so much kinder when she was younger? Why had it seemed beautiful?

Amy Zhang

#43. No one's going to be at our hundred-year reunion. Hell, no one's coming back for the five-year reunion." That was probably true.

Amy Zhang

#44. There's more to life than cause and effect.

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#45. I am thinking about the way we love each other. I am thinking about our soul, one atom and bruised all over now that I have dragged it behind me with my muddy hands.

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#46. Liz Emerson held so much darkness within her that closing her eyes didn't make much a difference at all.

Amy Zhang

#47. Because Liz Emerson held so much darkness within her that closing her eyes didn't make much of a difference at all.

Amy Zhang

#48. She knew so many people so many but what was the point? How many of them did she really care about? How many of them really cared about her?

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#49. Miracles do not belong to fairy tales. Miracles belong to the desperate, because only the desperate believe in bullshit.

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#50. Her mother's words echoed through her head: love you. People threw them around so easily, as if they were nothing, as if they meant nothing.

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#51. There are things worth dying for.

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#52. it's never too late to change. Every day is a blank page, and your story has yet to be written.

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#53. We wonder what lies beyond.
One day, she will grow up and imagine death as an angel that will lend her wings, so she can find out.
Death, unfortunately, is not in the business of lending wings.

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#54. You have to understand yourself before you can understand anything else.

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#55. Newton's laws of physics can rarely be applied to the real world. There is more to life than cause and effect. Things just aren't that simple

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#56. I wish second chances were real.

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#57. Sometimes they got lost. Sometimes they didn't want to be found. But it was a big forest and a bigger world, and whenever they went anywhere without each other, they left trails of stones that led all the way back to each other.

Because they loved each other with the biggest love of all.

Amy Zhang

#58. Please," he whispers. "remember the sky.

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#59. Micah lives like an apology. He blushes when he breathes because he's taking someone else's air. It's like all Micah wants is to disappear, and he thinks if he's quiet enough, if he keeps his eyes on the ground and barely breathes and treads lightly, people will forget he exists.

Amy Zhang

#60. I don't need to keep my misanthropy in check. It runs wild.

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#61. When I crash, I will be inertia mass acceleration force gravity opposite equal everything. I will be nothing.

Amy Zhang

#62. She would be an object in motion that would stay in motion, even if it meant flattening everything in her path.

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#63. If she loved them, if she loved anything, it was because it burned.

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#64. Like I said, the world isn't always fair, and sometimes we have to help it along.

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#65. We race the world, and as fast as it rotates, as fast at it revolves, we are faster.

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#66. She wanted to go back. She wanted to be a little girl again, the one who thought getting high meant being pushed on the swing and pain was falling off her bike.

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#67. How many times can a person explode?

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#68. And suddenly it's very clear to her that every action is an interaction, and everything she has ever done has led to something else, and to another something else, and all of that is ending here, at the bottom of the hill by Highway 34, and she is dying.

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#69. Today the snow is white and swirling, the sky is close, and the world is so big and beautiful and infinite that we don't need to pretend. All we know is already perfect.

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#70. She had been desperate to feel something, anything. She needed a window, because she had broken her heart throwing it at locked doors.

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#71. Drowned out by the sound of his heart throwing itself against his ribcage.

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#72. There was a certain freedom in being on the outside. He watched instead of being watched.

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#73. She wasn't here to make memories. She was here for the flashing lights and the sweat and the smoke and the feel of someone else's skin against hers.

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#74. Life is messy and the universe has an awful lot of people to keep track of. Sometimes things get screwed up. Sometimes bad things happen to good people. Sometimes good things happen to bad people.
That isn't fair.
Bad things should happen to bad people.
And they will. They will.

Amy Zhang

#75. It is then, when she releases her need to understand, that everything falls into place.

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#76. She wanted to be a little girl again, the one who thought getting high meant being pushed on the swings and pain was falling off her bike

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#77. Forgetting is the easy part. This should be unsurprising, but it surprises me. Forgetting was easy. Remembering is endless and it hurts, endlessly.

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#78. He embraced his weirdness, and it was nice.

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#79. Gravity is our playmate, momentum is our friend. We are blurs of motion. We are racing, and we are both winning, because we do not race each other. We race the world, and as fast as it rotates, as fast as it revolves, we are faster.

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#80. Some things are easier to forget than other things, I'm noticing.

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#81. I remember threading my fingers through his and pressing our life lines together

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