Brenna Yovanoff Quotes

#1. I just want that, the way I feel when you kiss me. Just having it makes all the bad things better.

Brenna Yovanoff

#2. Callie glances over her shoulder. She's younger than me, but aggressively put together, with curled hair and heavy lipstick.

Brenna Yovanoff

#3. We're literal people, you and me. Whatever the most obvious interpretation is, that's our truth.

Brenna Yovanoff

#4. Even in that black dress, even in the dark, Waverly was the brightest thing in the gym.

Brenna Yovanoff

#5. I was too little to think a miracle could be anything but good.

Brenna Yovanoff

#6. The new mythology of love was that it bent to the fashion of the day, obligated to take the shape of doves, lilies, jewels. This is a lie. Love is sometimes as passionate as war.

Brenna Yovanoff

#7. You're terribly selfish, you know. I've loved you so long, and it was never dear or precious to you. I might as well have not loved you at all.

Brenna Yovanoff

#8. Love is when you care more about something else than you do about yourself.

Brenna Yovanoff

#9. Why?" I say, so quietly that it comes out sounding like a tiny, tired sigh.
"Nobody wants to be mediocre." Her shadow on the ceiling is monstrous, a witch in profile.

Brenna Yovanoff

#10. The thought of him is electric, beating in my chest like a birthday wish, dark and warm and secret.

Brenna Yovanoff

#11. It's nice being around someone without always having to think about who you're supposed to be and what you're supposed to do and think and say. It's nice to just concentrate on being the person you are - whoever you are.

Brenna Yovanoff

#12. So, are you just going to stand there looking like a piece of furniture?

Brenna Yovanoff

#13. On the opposite page, there was a poem. It described how beauty and truth mattered more than anything else. They were the same thing.
But it didn't matter how pretty you painted the world.

Brenna Yovanoff

#14. I wanted to tell her that I loved her, and not in the complicated way I loved our parents, but in a simple way I never had to think about. I loved her like breathing.

Brenna Yovanoff

#15. I don't do anything I'm not good at.

Brenna Yovanoff

#16. Lillian laughs and rolls her eyes. Do I look like I know the answer to that? I always just locked on to the target and then followed it all the way down.

Brenna Yovanoff

#17. how awful to never be allowed to fail

Brenna Yovanoff

#18. Whatever they said, whatever they told you about yourself, it's not true

Brenna Yovanoff

#19. Sometimes this was just the way the game ended. Sometimes you did your best, and it all went straight to hell anyway.

Brenna Yovanoff

#20. You presume to name those who have no name. We are pandemonium and disaster. We are the dancing, gibbering horror of the world.

Brenna Yovanoff

#21. I wanted it in the way you sometimes want to jump into very cold water, even though you know it won't feel good. I wanted to go numb. To see what it felt like to be someone else.

Brenna Yovanoff

#22. The fact is, the contest has always been invulnerability, and even when you win, you still lose.

Brenna Yovanoff

#23. Back the, my life was mostly pieces-tire swings and lemonade, dogwood petals drifting down and going brown in the grass. Cotton dresses, bedsheets flapping on the line. An acre of front porch. A year of hopscotch rhymes.

Brenna Yovanoff

#24. I'm scared to disturb the balance, though- that delicate equilibrium. Marshall and I can only exist in the narrow spaces where I'm not me and he is not him.

Brenna Yovanoff

#25. Her voice was like loneliness. It was regret. She sang about a past you couldn't get out of and didn't want.

Brenna Yovanoff

#26. It's strange, but seeing something broken is somehow worse when you can tell that it used to be beautiful.

Brenna Yovanoff

#27. When did a name ever change what someone is?

Brenna Yovanoff

#28. I still can't picture what he does in his every day life when he's not busy with school or misdemeanors or me.

Brenna Yovanoff

#29. History was a tangled thing, people were resilient, and the one constant law of the world was that it would heal.

Brenna Yovanoff

#30. Don't you ever just have those days where even if you don't really like someone, you might as well hang out with them because right then, it's better than being alone?

Brenna Yovanoff

#31. Her smile doesn't look any more real than mine. I wonder if she has to practice too.

Brenna Yovanoff

#32. Fisher twined his fingers with mine and when he did, the feeling was the best thing in the world, like it was always better to be this tangled up, to always have a piece of each other.

Brenna Yovanoff

#33. Your gods don't know you exist.
And that's okay.

Brenna Yovanoff

#34. The first thing I saw when I opened my eyes was a burst of light so warm and red it could have been the sun or someone's beating heart. I stared up at it, waiting for the room to come clear.

Brenna Yovanoff

#35. I have never seen two people so in love, and so completely untouchable.

Brenna Yovanoff

#36. Why are you so determined to destroy yourself?" I say, and my voice is very small.
"I don't know," he whispers back. "Why are you?

Brenna Yovanoff

#37. Thinking of this friend I had. This friend I loved and keep loving
dead, but never really gone.

Brenna Yovanoff

#38. I start, because if I don't, then everything just stays the same.

Brenna Yovanoff

#39. I'd been living on dreams so long it was hard to know if any one of the fifteen things happening inside my head was real.

Brenna Yovanoff

#40. When I press my forehead to his back, the shape of his pain is alluring, almost visible. It forms him, tells him to protect himself, makes him everything he is. He needs to keep it.

Brenna Yovanoff

#41. Her eyes are so wild and bright they almost look like stars.

Brenna Yovanoff

#42. I didn't know how to respond to that. There was something disturbing about being responsible for partially decayed girls going swimming.

Brenna Yovanoff

#43. People make decisions, and maybe you don't always agree, but those choices are still their own.

Brenna Yovanoff

#44. Disco-clown hooker

Brenna Yovanoff

#45. Do you really want to know where we come from?" she said. "In every century, in every country, they'll call us something different. They'll say we're ghosts, angels, demons, elemental spirits, and giving us a name doesn't help anybody. When did a name change what someone is?

Brenna Yovanoff

#46. Her gaze was direct, full of a sadness so raw and crystallized that I could see the shape of it.

Brenna Yovanoff

#47. We lay on the grass beside the cemetery fence, kissing and shivering. Her teeth started to chatter and I pulled her against me, which made me feel like a superhero for no apparent reason.

Brenna Yovanoff

#48. Their lead guitar sounded like what would happen if someone wedged a traffic accident into a blender.

Brenna Yovanoff

#49. I'm better at being sorry.

Brenna Yovanoff

#50. Lillian was always so good at treating everything like a test, like some kind of game where the prize was shiny and untouchable. Perfection. She wanted me to back off, butt out, stop trying to control her life. And she wanted me to save her.

Brenna Yovanoff

#51. The effectiveness of your persona is inversely proportional to what people know about you.

Brenna Yovanoff

#52. The world is full of unused corners.

Brenna Yovanoff

#53. ...the bad thing was that Ollie started crying. It was this basic rule of middle school that if someone messed with you, you were supposed to just take it like a psychopath. Only Ollie wasn't one.

Brenna Yovanoff

#54. Sometimes being who you are - whoever you are - is hard. Sometimes, you can have it all together and still drive yourself crazy.

Brenna Yovanoff

#55. God, I hate her!" Kelly shouts as soon as Connor and his mom are out of the store. "How did that wretched, wretched woman ever even find someone to procreate with?

Brenna Yovanoff

#56. All my life, I've understood the nature of where I come from, but I never thought it might be wicked until now.

Brenna Yovanoff

#57. Ariel is capable of whispering the same way a toaster is capable of flight.

Brenna Yovanoff

#58. It's not luck, Waverly. I mean yeah, to find someone who really gets you, maybe that's luck, but if you treat people like they matter, they remember it.

Brenna Yovanoff

#59. The hours spool out like a ribbon I can't find the end of.

Brenna Yovanoff

#60. He was a whole mess of almosts, of mismatched pieces.

Brenna Yovanoff

#61. It seemed so hopeless, so impossible that a life could rest on such a small thing (the human heart).

Brenna Yovanoff

#62. When you name something, you take away some of it's power. It becomes known

Brenna Yovanoff

#63. Let me tell you a little bit about demons. They love pain and other people's misery. They lie when it suits them and don't see anything wrong with it. They corrupt and kill and destroy, all without conscience. You just don't have the capacity for something as honorable as loving another person.

Brenna Yovanoff

#64. Take your necklace off."
"Why?"
"Because if you don't, I can't kiss you.

Brenna Yovanoff

#65. Our whole lives, it was like we were always trying so hard to be perfect - for our families and our friends, for each other - when the funny thing was, we didn't have to. In the end, we were better than that.

Brenna Yovanoff

#66. He sighs, smiling a resigned little smile. "Waverly, you make me want to die, but it's in the best way. You have no idea.

Brenna Yovanoff

#67. I'm not about love, but in this moment, I wish that I were.

Brenna Yovanoff

#68. Once, my mother told a whole host of angels that she'd rather die than go back to a man she didn't love.

Brenna Yovanoff

#69. Intention is one of the most powerful forces there is. What you mean when you do a thing will always determine the outcome. The law creates the world.

Brenna Yovanoff

#70. But what Davenport had been born into had taken so much from her, leaving her with just the wickedest and the worst. Her father had given her life, and then taken every scrap of joy or freedom, and even now that he was dead, all he had left her with was a deep, abiding hatred for what she was.

Brenna Yovanoff

#71. People do that sometimes. Change.

Brenna Yovanoff

#72. I want to be still and small, and not have to man up or act like everything's okay, but the thing about living in a house where someone is sick is, it's like they have a monopoly on it. If one person is always needing things , then no one else is really allowed to.

Brenna Yovanoff

#73. It seemed to me that some things were ugly enough that fixing them was worth trespassing.

Brenna Yovanoff

#74. Look, you don't want to put the power in the hands of the people, okay? You're just going to get three hundred write-in votes for My Dick.

Brenna Yovanoff

#75. She was the purest, biggest truth.

Brenna Yovanoff

#76. The fear of God is nothing compared to the fear of tragedy and loss. -The Lady

Brenna Yovanoff

#77. What's up?' he said, like the church was always burning down and I always called him on a school night, telling him to come over after dark and bring a shovel.

Brenna Yovanoff

#78. ...and when I pretended to Portia or myself that the dark stuff couldn't touch me, that was a lie.

Brenna Yovanoff

#79. Everything smells like mildew, and the grim commitment to filth that can only be cultivated by post-adolescent boys.

Brenna Yovanoff

#80. It was completely unshocking that there were monsters in the world, secret
rituals and underground burrows filled with the dead, when in my own way, I was secret and sort of monstrous too. It just didn't show in the same way.

Brenna Yovanoff

#81. I get out my hairbrush and wish for her - the real Lillian, and not the worst, most selfish parts of her. I wish for a warm, true best friend, one who didn't die.

Brenna Yovanoff

#82. It's hazardous, though, being that much to someone. When you're the yardstick that everything else is measure against, eventually, you just fail.

Brenna Yovanoff

#83. All the things are want are hard to find the words for.

Brenna Yovanoff

#84. You have to think about your options, weigh the consequences before you make decisions, but the advice was so worthless when it came to the things that mattered.

Brenna Yovanoff

#85. Epochs later, the curtains grew dusty and brittle, the deep, vicious colour of a bruise. The floorboards creaked and we were civilized. We were no longer the wild, ravening voices of the world, howling our shame and indignation at the sky.

Brenna Yovanoff

#86. From the window, I watch the city and the freeway. In the distance, the sky-rises look like mystic spires, unbearably close and far. I want to pick them up and eat them. I want to scream out loud sometimes, but I never do.

Brenna Yovanoff

#87. You asked me about love. I don't know about love, Daphne. I just know I don't want anything but you. I don't want to be anywhere but with you.

Brenna Yovanoff

#88. The treachery of demons is nothing compared to the betrayal of an angel.

Brenna Yovanoff

#89. They?" he said, sounding apprehensive.
"Me. They're like me."
"Don't be a jackass," Roswell said, but not meanly. "No one's like you.

Brenna Yovanoff

#90. It's not the wisest thing - love - but when it happens, there's not a lot you can do to stop it. Sometimes you just have to soldier on through.

Brenna Yovanoff

#91. You're pale and you're cold, and you reek like steel.

Brenna Yovanoff

#92. For the first time in maybe my whole life, I feel dangerous and magical, like a dragon or a mermaid. A fury, standing there with my half-gone grape slush and my jaw clenched, ready for whatever comes next.

Brenna Yovanoff

#93. We sat on the picnic bench, not talking, not looking at each other, but being quiet and okay. The rain was almost gone, nothing but a thin chilly fog. For now, I just wanted to sit on the picnic bench with him and not be anything but fine and uncomplicated.

Brenna Yovanoff

#94. I stand in front of him, trying to figure out how to look friendly or normal and where to put my hands ... It seems ridiculous suddenly that people have hands and no place to put them.

Brenna Yovanoff

#95. When you love someone, sometimes it means that they strip you down, peel you open, and you have to let them and not worry about how much it's going to hurt.

Brenna Yovanoff

#96. Goodbye," she said.
When I didn't say it back, she rested her hand on the top of my head. The weight was strange and gentle. "I love you," she said. "And when I tell you goodbye, I don't mean forever or for long. Just that I'm going home now, and so are you.

Brenna Yovanoff

#97. He smiles an honest smile for the first time, and the difference is hard to describe but easy to recognize.

Brenna Yovanoff

#98. For the past month and a half, it's been inanely hot every single day. Someone's bound to feel a little homicidal now and then.

Brenna Yovanoff

#99. The last time I was this close to him, it was a commotion of touching. His hands, picking apart the rigid panels of my exoskeleton. His mouth, finding mine with the certainty of a meteor.

Brenna Yovanoff

#100. There was a whole, sprawling world underneath us, filled with ugly, vicious, beautiful people. The line between the two places was thin, hardly a separation, and both ran on pain and blood and fear and death and joy and music.
But for now, the sunset was enough.

Brenna Yovanoff