Top 100 Katja Millay Quotes
#1. People like Josh Bennett and I don't get perfect. Most of the time, we don't even get remotely tolerable. And that's why it scares me. Because, even if there was such a thing to begin with, perfect never lasts.
Katja Millay
#2. It's like having a ghost in my garage. I feel like I'm being haunted. With all the dead people I've got in my corner, you'd think one of them would be the one hanging around.
Katja Millay
#3. My phone is on my bed, whispering in my ear like a bottle of scotch to a recovering alcoholic, while the rain continues cackling at me through my window
Katja Millay
#4. I say Sunshine and then she shatters.
All the pieces of all the girls go flying and I'm holding the one who's left.
Katja Millay
#5. Good Morning, Sunshine! Josh F**king Bennett. By now, I'm pretty sure that if I were to find his birth certificate that is exactly what it would say.
Katja Millay
#6. I am pressed so hard against the earth by the weight of reality that some days I wonder how I am still able to lift my feet to walk.
Katja Millay
#7. I doubt taking in a sullen, bitter, teenage girl with more issues than National Geographic is at the center of the vision board for a single woman in her early thirties.
Katja Millay
#8. Plus, once he did the requisite double-take and recognized me, he'd probably beat the crap out of any guy who looked at me in all my Snow White meets Frederick's of Hollywood glory.
Katja Millay
#9. If self-adoration were cologne, he would be the boy you couldn't stand next to without choking.
Katja Millay
#10. What is she to you?" she whispers. The real question and I know the answer even if I don't know how to say it. Drew's muffled voice rises up from the floor before I can respond. "Family," he says. And he's right.
Katja Millay
#11. I think I'll stay in pieces. I can shift them, rearrange, depending on the day, depending on what I need to be. I can change on a whim and be so many different girls and none of them has to be me.
Katja Millay
#12. I didn't stop talking immediately. I talked right up until the day I remembered everything that happened, over a year later. That was the day I went silent. It wasn't a ploy or a tactic. It wasn't psychosomatic. It was a choice. And I made it.
Katja Millay
#13. I believe in God, Sunshine. I've always believed that God exists," he says. And what he says next isn't self-pity or angst or melodrama. It's truth. "I just know that he hates me." Maybe
Katja Millay
#14. if I could take a picture of the expression that passes between them, I would, and then I'd shove it in both their faces so they could never deny it again.
Katja Millay
#15. I feel like grabbing my crotch and checking to see if my balls are still there because I think they may be in her pocket and I need to get them back.
Katja Millay
#16. The silent thing is definitely a barrier in terms of making friends
Katja Millay
#17. And as much as I'm telling her to stay here, I still want her to choose to come with me. To say fuck sanity and healing and closure. To say that I am the only thing she needs to be well and whole and alive. But we both know that's not true.
Katja Millay
#18. If Edna St. Vincent Millay was right and childhood is the kingdom where nobody dies, then my childhood ended when I was fifteen.
Katja Millay
#19. What about Josh?" I think there's more to that question than she's letting on but she's testing the waters. Salvation, I write. She looks at the word and nods. And for a minute she looks as sad as I feel.
"That fits, I think.
Katja Millay
#20. Thats the irony of Josh and me, and it shames me every time I think about it. He has no family. No one to love him. I'm surrounded by love and I dont want any of it. I piss all over what he woud thank God for. And if I needed more proof that I have no soul, then there it is.
Katja Millay
#21. If eavesdropping on someone else's nightmares is supposed to make me feel better, I'd rather stay feeling like shit. I don't think telling them about my horror story would do me any good. And besides, I'm not even supposed to have a story to tell. - Nastya Kashnikov
Katja Millay
#22. Seeing Josh is my homecoming. I didn't tell him I was coming back. He doesn't say anything when he sees me, and neither do I, because the fact that I'm here is an answer. We just look at each other and speak in the silence like we always have and no one interrupts the conversation.
Katja Millay
#23. It's not the sound itself that bothers me; it's just the fact that it's loud. The loud sounds make it impossible to hear the soft sounds and the soft sounds are the ones you have to be afraid of.
Katja Millay
#24. No one ever asks. Like they think they're doing me a favor. That if they don't bring it up, I won't have to think about it. Just because I don't talk about it doesn't mean i forget. I don't talk about it because no one ever asks.
Katja Millay
#26. Your name could mean to excel and you could be useless and crap at everything. You can put a name on anything, call it whatever you want, doesn't make it real. Doesn't make it true.
Katja Millay
#27. Maybe I can save her right now, in this moment, and if I can do that, maybe it will save me and maybe that can be enough.
Katja Millay
#28. Everyone wants to fix me. My
parents want to fix me. My brother wants
to fix me. My therapists want to fix me.
You're supposed to be the person who
doesn't want to fix me.
Katja Millay
#29. Just so you know," I inform him, "one day, I'm going to get tired of sharing your affection with that coffee table and I'm going to make you choose." "Just so you know," he mimics me, "I would chop that table up and use it for firewood before I would ever choose anything over you.
Katja Millay
#30. It's a little bit devastating being surrounded by people who can do what you can't anymore. People who create. People whose souls don't live in their bodies anymore because they've leached so much of themselves into their work.
Katja Millay
#31. And if there is any part of my heart left to break, it breaks with his confusion.
Katja Millay
#32. Then one day I guess my mind decided I was ready, because that was the day I remembered everything and then I stopped answering the questions altogether. I think maybe my brain made a mistake about how strong I was, but it didn't let me send the memories back.
Katja Millay
#33. It's a chair. Stop overanalyzing it. I'm not selling it and I'm not giving it to someone else. I made it for you. It's yours.
Katja Millay
#34. It's probably a class for guidance counselors only - How to Emit Inappropriate Joy in the Face of Adolescent Horror. I'm fairly certain they don't make teachers take it, because they don't even bother to pretend.
Katja Millay
#35. Do real boys actually call girls baby? I don't have enough experience to know. I do know that if a guy ever called me baby, I'd probably laugh in his face. Or choke him.
Katja Millay
#36. I shrug. I'm an excellent shrugger. It's rivaled only by my ability to nod.
Katja Millay
#37. How is it that with everything that's happened in my life, this girl is going to be the thing that undoes me?
Katja Millay
#38. Like the glass I've been looking through is coated in the dust of my own perception and I haven't seen what's real.
Katja Millay
#39. I'd trade my hand all over again to take back everything I did and hear him call me Sunshine.
Katja Millay
#40. It's the Josh Bennett equivalent of tattooing her name across my chest.
Katja Millay
#41. If I could be alone, I would. Gratefully. I'd rather be alone than have to pretend I'm okay.
Katja Millay
#42. I know at that moment what he's given me and it isn't a chair. It's an invitation, a welcome, the knowledge that I am accepted here. He hasn't given me a place to sit. He's given me a place to belong.
Katja Millay
#43. No matter how good he looks right now, Josh Bennett without work boots & the smell of sawdust is all sorts of wrong.
Katja Millay
#45. Josh isn't in love with me and I'm not in love with him."
"Sell it to someone who's buying, Sunshine. Have you seen the way he looks at you?" I've seen the way he looks at me but I don't know what it means. "Like you're a seventeenth-century, hand-carved table in mint condition.
Katja Millay
#46. Immoral people debating the existence of God is always a crowd pleaser.
Katja Millay
#47. Thank You. Life is short and TBR lists are long. I know time is precious and I thank you for spending yours with this book.
Katja Millay
#49. Some people have problems and you need to learn to empathize, not judge.
Katja Millay
#50. He's so blatantly obvious, it's almost inspired. Almost.
Katja Millay
#51. Didn't you say she lives in Josh's neighborhood? Mrs. Leighton asks. I think I actually hear her loading the bullets into that question.
Katja Millay
#52. Now - a profanity-spewing guttersnipe being dragged out of a crack house on Cops. I
Katja Millay
#53. I'm going to walk over to you," I say, taking one step at a time in her direction like I'm talking down a jumper. "I'm going to put my arms around you and I'm going to hold you," I pause before taking the last step, "and you're going to let me.
Katja Millay
#54. I've done goodbyes before, and I can do this one, too. Somehow this one hurts worse than the others; because this one I could prevent if I wanted to, since I'm the one saying it. This goodbye comes with a choice the way none of the others did.
Katja Millay
#55. Then, I'll find an empty restroom and check my hair and fix my lipstick, or as we cowards like to call it, hide.
Katja Millay
#56. I spent every lunch period practicing in the music room and that was the only place I wanted to be.
Katja Millay
#57. Some things you just have to learn to live with.
Katja Millay
#58. I'm under a microscope where my every facial expression is being studied. It makes me want to scream, but I can't, so I just swallow it like dirt and blood.
Katja Millay
#59. His hands are miracles. I can watch them for hours, transforming wood into something it never dreamed of being.
Katja Millay
#60. I don't really care what people say about me. I'm fine with lies and rumors. It's the truth I don't want being told.
Katja Millay
#61. Everything is hell now and I deserve it, but I can handle pain.
Katja Millay
#62. I like finding things no one else is looking for. Things that got lost or forgotten, shoved in a corner. Stuff I never knew existed. I don't even need to buy it. I just like to find it and know that it's there. That's the part I like.
Katja Millay
#63. I don't do hugging. I don't like people touching me ever when there's no treat involved. It's too intimate and it bothers me.
Katja Millay
#64. Just because I don't talk about it, doesn't mean I forget.
Katja Millay
#65. I'm wondering if I'm allowed to hate Josh Bennett, because I'm thinking I might start.
Katja Millay
#66. Call me Sunshine again, and I will murder you, cocksucker.
Katja Millay
#67. Maybe nobody knows how. Sometimes it's easier to pretend nothing is wrong than to face the fact that everything is wrong, but you're powerless to do anything about it.
Katja Millay
#69. A few minutes later, she comes out of my bedroom wearing one of my t-shirts, and it might almost be worse than seeing her in no shirt at all.
Katja Millay
#70. I can't find a street sign, but I know I ran fast and I ran far and I didn't pay attention to anything. I broke every rule that I have and I've gotten what I deserve for it. It's the middle of the night and I am alone and lost and drenched in darkness.
Katja Millay
#71. I'm trying to see the magic in everyday miracles now: the fact that my heart still beats, that I can lift my feet off of the earth to walk and that there is something in me worthy of love.
Katja Millay
#72. Was the cake at least good? He knows where my heart lies.
Katja Millay
#73. Maybe I just wanted the girl to look at me again. (Josh)
Katja Millay
#75. It's bad enough that my brain is a cesspool; I can't imagine the hellhole my heart would be if he wasn't in it. Since
Katja Millay
#76. Personally, I'd rather shove a cactus up my ass, but apparently that option isn't on the table, so I might as well just rip the Band-Aid off now and get it over with.
Katja Millay
#77. Josh Bennett laughs, and for one minute, everything is right in the world.
Katja Millay
#78. On every side of me are the lights and the tools and the wood and the boots and the boy I want to see forever. And if my Sea of Tranquility were real, it would be this place, with him.
Katja Millay
#79. He took the fucking piano, Sunshine. He didn't take everything. Look at your left hand. It's probably clenched in a fist right now, isn't it?"
I don't need to look. It is. He knows it.
"Now open it up and let it go."
And I do.
Katja Millay
#80. People believe in God because they don't believe in themselves. They need something else to depend on or to blame instead of taking responsibility for their own shit - crap, excrement, waste, mistakes, faults.
Katja Millay
#81. We're like mysteries to one another. Maybe if I can solve him and he can solve me, we can explain each other. Maybe that's what I need. Someone to explain me.
Katja Millay
#82. She glares at me like I spend my free time murdering puppies.
Katja Millay
#83. Everything in me turns on and shuts down at the same time. I am weak and strong. I am terrified and brave. I am lost and found. I am here and gone. I'm afraid I'm going to stop breathing again.
Katja Millay
#84. I took my schedule, my map, and my abject horror and made my way to class, reading it again and again as I went. Unfortunately it stayed the same every time.
Katja Millay
#85. My closet and I are on my own. My closet is of no use to me. It may actually be laughing at me. It's true, I hear it.
Katja Millay
#86. You get halfway through with your life and you realize you haven't done the things you wanted to do or become what you'd thought you'd become and it's disheartening.
Katja Millay
#87. He needs to be able to fix things and make it all better; to believe that you're okay so that he can believe that he's okay.
Katja Millay
#88. There are so many things that can break you if there's nothing to hold you together.
Katja Millay
#89. I'd watch her, amazed at just how much a person could accomplish fueled by tea and regret.
Katja Millay
#91. Every normal family is one tragedy away from complete implosion.
Katja Millay
#92. As soon as it's out of my mouth, I cringe, realizing that it's probably pretty crappy to complain about your parents to someone who doesn't have any. It's like bitching that your shoes are too tight to someone who's walking across broken glass barefoot.
Katja Millay
#93. If I'm going to be rejected, I'd like it to come complete with humiliation.
Katja Millay
#94. ...but She chooses her battles these days and I'm not sure this one would make the cut.
Katja Millay
#95. I'm tired of being responsible for other people's misery. I can't even put up with my own.
Katja Millay
#96. You can't change the rules and think everyone else is just going to keep playing.
Katja Millay
#97. He's the kind of good-looking that transforms once self-respecting females into useless puddles of dumbass.
Katja Millay
#98. It doesn't matter if you do everything right, if you dress the right way and the right way and follow all the rules, because evil will find you anyway.
Katja Millay
#99. I don't know if I'm okay. It shouldn't be possible to be this close to another person. To let them crawl inside you.
Katja Millay
#100. Depends on how badly you want it. It's worth whatever you're willing to pay for it.
Katja Millay
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