Laurie Halse Anderson Quotes

... sooner or later she had to give up the hope for a better past.

It's impossible to compete with the dead. I wished I could stop trying.

Say goodbye to yesterday...those are the words I'll never say.

Regrets are so far from reality.

You'll find it-when you try to die- The Easier to let go- For recollecting such as went- You could not spare-you know.

Our suffering is caused by holding on to how things might have been, should have been, could have been.

Everything I loved became everything I've lost.

Holding onto something that's gone only makes a sickness inside.

I don't want to live the rest of my life thinking about you and dreaming of what might have been. Stay with me, Allie.

The punctuation of anniversaries is terrible, like the closing of doors, one after another between you and what you want to hold on to.

For me, the dilemma is I love Bristol, but you can only do that for so long and not get it back. It's been something that's been hard for me to accept. It breaks my heart.

They're just memories now. Time to write them off.

If I could undo what's been done, But I guess everyone is living, With water and bridges.

My choices are rejections, since there is no other way, but what I reject is more numerous, denser, more demanding than before. A little poem, a sigh, at the cost of indescribable losses.

I was right when I said I'd never look back. It hurts too much, it drags at your heart till you can't ever do anything else except look back.

Everyone knows pain. We are not meant to carry it forever. We were never meant to hold it so closely, so be certain in the belief that what pain belongs to now will belong soon to then. That when someone asks you how was your day, realize that for some of us - it's the only way we know how to say, be calm. Loosen your grip, opening each palm, slowly now - let go.

It is never good dwelling on good-byes ... it is not the being together that it prolongs, it is the parting.

The reason 'closure' is a cliche is that it is used too often, too imprecisely, and doesn't in any case reflect reality. In reality, such closure in broken friendships and much else in life is rarely achieved; only death brings closure and then not always for those still living.

Sometimes I feel sad, but this is not nostalgia, because I don't want time to come back.

No need to be sentimental to mourn the loss of Paradise.

When you put so much effort to forget someone, the effort itself becomes a memory. Then you have to forget the forgetting, and that too is memorable.

We are all our own graveyards, I believe; we squat amongst the tombs of the people we were. If we're healthy, every day is a celebration, a Day of the Dead, in which we give thanks for the lives that we lived, and if we are neurotic we brood and mourn and wish that the past was still present.

But the worst of imagining things is that the time comes when you have to stop and that hurts.

It is hard to forgive, and to look at those eyes, and feel those wasted hands,' he answered. 'Kiss me again; and don’t let me see your eyes! I forgive what you have done to me. I love my murderer—but yours! How can I?