Top 60 Amy Engel Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Little girls were never safe. I should know; I used to be one of them.”

— Amy Engel

2. “I want to see you naked. I want to touch you. I want you to touch me. I just... want.”

— Amy Engel

3. “Life is one sick joke after another, I’m discovering. Because it hardly seems fair that it should hurt so much to finally get exactly what I’ve been wishing for.”

— Amy Engel

4. “But I want to be better than the lessons they taught me. I want my love to be greater that my hate, my mercy to be stronger than my vengeance.”

— Amy Engel

5. “Roanoke girls never last long around here. In the end, we either run or we die.”

— Amy Engel

6. “He is such a child underneath all his alpha male bravado. A selfish child who thinks everything in the whole world is meant for him.”

— Amy Engel

7. “It would leave a little rotten spot, right here.” I push my fist into the soft space beneath my rib cage. “Something that would only get bigger and darker with time.”

— Amy Engel

8. “The real danger has always lived in my granddad’s kind voice, his soft caresses. All of it masquerading as innocent, but really just a gateway drug for girls starved for affection, desperate for someone to love them. He doesn’t force us with a heavy hand. He manipulates with a gentle touch, guides us exactly where he wants us to go. So in the end, we blame only ourselves.”

— Amy Engel

9. “A boy who doesn’t want to lie, married to a girl who can’t tell the truth.”

— Amy Engel

10. “Even if most of the time we navigate so carefully we might as well be bombs trying not to explode, we are still always there, in each other’s paths. Just waiting for the moments we intersect.”

— Amy Engel

11. “My mission is not to make him happy and bear his children and be his wife. My mission is to kill him.”

— Amy Engel

12. “You’re easy to read, Ivy, but the whole book of you is complicated.”

— Amy Engel

13. “The vow came too fast, too easily. The kind of promise it’s easy to make because you’ve already broken it before the words are even spoken. It was the first time he’d ever lied to me.”

— Amy Engel

14. “Your eyes are still sad,” she tells me. “But your whole face lights up when you look at him.”

— Amy Engel

15. “My father might not have held my hand or expressed his love openly, but he taught Callie and me that we had inherent values, that we were fully formed human beings without a boy by our side.”

— Amy Engel

16. “One summer is enough. Hell, sometimes one day is all it takes to change your life.”

— Amy Engel

17. “How do you measure the life of one person against the greater good? Can it ever be the right thing to sacrifice an innocent person? And how do you know what the greater good really is?”

— Amy Engel

18. “Sometimes it’s a revelation, even to me, how much more comfortable I am with cruelty than with kindness.”

— Amy Engel

19. “He blows out a breath, takes a step toward me. The hallway is so narrow that I’m pinned between the wall and his body, heat rolling off him in waves. “Yeah,” he says, voice low. “I feel things.” His green eyes burn. It’s the most emotion I’ve seen from him so far, and I have trouble taking a full breath, my lungs compressed with tension. “That’s the whole point, Ivy. I want you to feel them, too.”

— Amy Engel

20. “Is it still manipulation if you know it’s happening, but it works anyway?”

— Amy Engel

21. “I like that he is complex, that the final result of all his pieces will be something unique and hard to solve. I have no right to wish it, and no hope the wish can ever be granted, but I still long to be the one to decipher him.”

— Amy Engel

22. “When your fate is predetermined, there’s not much benefit in coddling.”

— Amy Engel

23. “He knows me better than anyone ever has. Than anyone ever will again. I would have stopped it if I could have. But I’ve learned the hard way, we can’t choose who we love. Love chooses us. Love doesn’t care about what’s convenient or easy or planned. Love has its own agenda and all we can do is get out of its way.”

— Amy Engel

24. “A tear slips down her face. I wish one would slip down mine.”

— Amy Engel

25. “He didn’t save me, though. He allowed me the freedom to save myself, which is the very best type of rescue.”

— Amy Engel

26. “I don’t understand how the pain of losing him can be a pale shadow in comparison to the pain of finding him again.”

— Amy Engel

27. “I’ve grown accustomed to the stars above my head as I sleep, the ache in my muscles as we walk the land. The freedom that comes with defining your world instead of letting it define you.”

— Amy Engel

28. “I grieve the daughter I was, the wife I never wanted to be, the killer I refused to become, the traitor I pretended to be.”

— Amy Engel

29. “He’s an eighteen-year-old boy and this is his wedding night. I don’t think he’s taking me home to play checkers.”

— Amy Engel

30. “How did you even know where to look?” “I’m the president’s son, remember? I’d heard rumors about a group near the river, southeast of Westfall. I figured it was as good a place to start as any.” “Why?” I draw back. “Why would you do that?” “Remember what I told you once?” He pauses. His fingers graze the sensitive skin of my waist underneath my shirt. “About not giving up on you?”

— Amy Engel

31. “You can’t outrun what’s inside of you. You can only acknowledge it, work around it, try and turn it into something better. I may not know exactly where I’m headed, but this time I’m choosing my own destiny.”

— Amy Engel

32. “We fall asleep that way. His lips on my neck. My heart in his hand.”

— Amy Engel

33. “Strange how the sound of a single word can hurt more than a ruined shoulder, cut deeper than a bloody gash.”

— Amy Engel

34. “I’m not sure how we got to this place, where a girl’s only value is in what kind of marriage she has, how capable she is of keeping a man happy.”

— Amy Engel

35. “I knew well the painful futility of reaching for more than you were ever likely to get, how much easier it was to simply accept the limits of your world.”

— Amy Engel

36. “And I understand in a way I never have before that loving someone is always going to feel like flying – the unthinkable drop, the fear of falling, the heart-in-your-throat thrill. It is always going to be impossible until the moment that it’s not and you’re soaring on pure faith, your altitude completely dependant upon something you can’t control.”

— Amy Engel

37. “Maybe I’ll be okay. Maybe I’ll make it to the ocean.”

— Amy Engel

38. “There are only two choices. Stay here and die. Or get up and see what happens next.”

— Amy Engel

39. “It had always been the apartment of a family who only escaped true poverty through sheer stubbornness and the generosity of others. Others.”

— Amy Engel

40. “I just want to be with you. Walk next to you, Ivy, wherever you’re headed. That’s all.”

— Amy Engel

41. “You don’t stop loving someone just because they disappoint you.”

— Amy Engel

42. “I want to be someone strong and brave enough to make hard choices. But I want to be fair and loving enough to make the right ones.”

— Amy Engel

43. “I’m glad she’s not faking affection. It’s more honest than what her husband is doing, at least. Dislike is an emotion I can respect.”

— Amy Engel

44. “I didn’t have a bad childhood, but there was no magic in it. No one hit me, no one neglected me, but there wasn’t much that was childlike about it. Even fun involved barely disguised lessons about my future and my father’s plans. It is only now, away from the presence of my family, that I can admit that to myself.”

— Amy Engel

45. “No one controls who we turn into but us.”

— Amy Engel

46. “I concentrate on the simple act of putting one foot in front of the other and continue moving forward even as part of me is left behind, beyond a fence I cannot breach.”

— Amy Engel

47. “That’s what love is, though, isn’t it? You don’t stop loving someone just because they disappoint you.”

— Amy Engel

48. “I know the days can get long if you don’t have a purpose.”

— Amy Engel

49. “I love you,” he says quietly. I want to take his words, the truth of them I can see on his face, and cup them in my hands like a glowing coal from the fire. Keep them with me warm and bright, a talisman.”

— Amy Engel

50. “You think I had a choice?” Bishop demands. “What choice? I’m not like your father or Callie, Ivy. I was never going to just let you go. I love you. There was never any choice.”

— Amy Engel