Top 80 Amy Reed Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “What if I’m so broken I can never do something as basic as feed myself? Do you realize how twisted that is? It amazes me sometimes that humans still exist. We’re just animals, after all. And how can an animal get so removed from nature that it loses the instinct to keep itself alive?”

— Amy Reed

2. “What if talking about your feelings doesn’t fix anything? What if what you really need is to make the feelings go away?”

— Amy Reed

3. “Never in the history of the world has telling someone to calm down actually helped them calm down,” Erin says.”

— Amy Reed

4. “And I am sick and tired of feeling pathetic.”

— Amy Reed

5. “I feel like I’m a snow globe and someone shook me up and now every little piece of me is falling back randomly and nothing is ending up where it used to be.”

— Amy Reed

6. “All I know is I feel crazy, like I want to cry and laugh and scream at the same time.”

— Amy Reed

7. “One small kindness in a sea of cruelty, one word of truth among lies, these are the seeds that can change the world.”

— Amy Reed

8. “Even though I’m sleeping again, everything still feels a little rickety, like I’m here but not quite here, like I’m just a stand-in for my real self, like someone could just reach over and pinch me and I’d deflate. I thought I was feeling better, but I don’t know anymore.”

— Amy Reed

9. “You can always cram the wrong piece into the puzzle hole if you push hard enough and limit your definition of ’fitting.”

— Amy Reed

10. “I am ready even if they aren’t. I am ready to say goodbye.”

— Amy Reed

11. “You save yourself or you remain unsaved.”

— Amy Reed

12. “Maybe sometimes you have to leave before you’re ready to let go; sometimes you have to leave before someone is ready to let go of you. That’s the rub of it-if you wait until you’re ready to do everything, you’ll never get anything done.”

— Amy Reed

13. “We are no more than our biology, our genetic programming. Nature is harsh and cruel and unsentimental. When you get down to it, boys are predators and girls are prey, and what people call love or even simple attraction is just the drug of hormones, evolved to make the survival of our species slightly less painful.”

— Amy Reed

14. “The youth pastor at our church says virginity is like a flower,” says Krista. “Losing your virginity before marriage is like plucking the petals off a flower. No one wants a flower without petals.” “No offense,” Sam says. “But that’s crap.”

— Amy Reed

15. “If you are still, no one can hurt you. If you play dead, there is nothing to kill.”

— Amy Reed

16. “Do you remember? Do you remember being solid? Do you remember life before the hole? Before you were empty and needed to be filled? There was a time when everything was enough. There was a time you didn’t try to get out of your own skin. Remember?”

— Amy Reed

17. “She feels too much. She is a raw nerve and the world is always trying to touch her.”

— Amy Reed

18. “I wonder if anybody else feels this way, if anyone in here is as scared as I am. Are they as sad and angry and confused and ashamed? Is that even possible? Is it even possible for one building to hold all that pain?”

— Amy Reed

19. “Silence does not mean yes. No can be thought and felt but never said. It can be screamed silently on the inside. It can be in the wordless stone of a clenched fist, fingernails digging into palm. Her lips sealed. Her eyes closed. His body just taking, never asking, never taught to question silence.”

— Amy Reed

20. “They know she heard them, but they don’t care, or maybe they even wanted her to. Like she’s not even a person, not someone with feelings, not someone who can get hurt. Just an object. Just something they can use.”

— Amy Reed

21. “Do you remember? Do you remember the world before the poison?”

— Amy Reed

22. “Our bodies are not toys for you to play with. They are not pieces in a game for you to manipulate and trick. We are not notches on your bedposts.”

— Amy Reed

23. “Maybe someday you’ll realize that we are both solid despite the cracks.”

— Amy Reed

24. “Because the girls are unstoppable. They are a force. They are a single body.”

— Amy Reed

25. “She says nothing to Pastor Skinner about how Jesus fought for what he believed in, how he stood up against corrupt people in power, how he showed women kindness and respect at a time in history when they received little of either. But that is not the Jesus who Pastor Skinner is talking about. In fact, the pastor isn’t talking much about Jesus at all.”

— Amy Reed

26. “I was trying to be brave. I was trying to let people in. I was trying. I am who I am today because of my messes. Because I’ve survived them. Because I’ve written about them. Because I’ve learned from them, because I keep searching for new tools to clean them up, because I keep trying to heal.”

— Amy Reed

27. “Humans are capable of a lot more than they know.”

— Amy Reed

28. “And that’s when it hits me, the punch in the stomach, the carving out of my insides. That’s when I realize that none of this is a movie. I will not go out with a bang. There is no ending. There are no credits. I will wake up and I will keep waking up and this will always be waiting for me.”

— Amy Reed

29. “He backs out the door batting those eyelashes I thought were so sexy when I first met him. Now I want to pluck them out one by one.”

— Amy Reed

30. “You get to a certain point and you just realize there’s no use in trying to pretend your normal.”

— Amy Reed

31. “I’m not the girl they remember. I’m not anyone they know.”

— Amy Reed

32. “Imagine everything feeling wrong. Imagine a hole in your chest the size of God.”

— Amy Reed

33. “Everyone’s always making fun of him and calling him crazy behind his back, but I can kind of understand how someone would end up that way. I mean, if no one ever pays attention to you telling the truth, then it probably makes sense to try lying for a change.”

— Amy Reed

34. “And my name sounds like flowers in his mouth.”

— Amy Reed

35. “Because unlike boys, girls turn inward. They hide. They adapt, even if it hurts. Because they are not screaming, people assume they do not suffer.”

— Amy Reed

36. “Sometimes it’s the freaks of nature who end up being the strongest.”

— Amy Reed

37. “I feel myself floating without the weight of him on my body.”

— Amy Reed

38. “But just because she’s not helpless doesn’t mean she doesn’t need help.”

— Amy Reed

39. “I figure it’s better to make a decision and do something rather than just sitting around thinking about it forever. Then at least I’ll be moving.”

— Amy Reed

40. “No one knows what to do with me now that I’m alive. There’s no protocol for how to treat someone who comes back from the dead. There are so many books about grief and loss, about saying good-bye to the people you love. But there is no book about taking back that good-bye.”

— Amy Reed

41. “But Erin has empathy, lots of it, so much it hurts sometimes, so much that other people’s pain turns into her own pain and makes her completely incapable of doing anything useful for anyone. That’s why it’s easier to avoid it than to engage. It’s easier to try to ignore it than try to comfort whoever’s hurting, because usually that backfires and makes things worse.”

— Amy Reed

42. “Is this what nice is? Letting people think things that aren’t true just to avoid hurting their feelings? Being nice is dishonest.”

— Amy Reed

43. “The problem with humans is they’re too enamored with themselves, and with mammals in general. As if big brains and live birth are necessarily signs of superiority. As if the hairy, air-breathing world is the only one that matters.”

— Amy Reed

44. “What Erin wants to do with pain is fix it, make it go away, and sometimes that’s not what other people want.”

— Amy Reed

45. “It is a place where hurting people is too easy, and where helping them is too hard. It is a place where the darkness is winning, where the darkness will always win.”

— Amy Reed

46. “Everyone gets the message when they’re a kid that girls like pink and boys like blue, but she’s taken it to a whole new level, like being a girl is her religion and wearing pink is some kind of commandment.”

— Amy Reed

47. “Me, I’m my own brand of perfect, I guess. The kind that has to work a little harder than everyone else.”

— Amy Reed

48. “Home of so many girls. Home of so many almost-women, waiting for their skin to fit.”

— Amy Reed

49. “This is the downside of being complete. Others want what you have. They covet your doneness.”

— Amy Reed

50. “I’ve spent my life comparing myself to everyone around me. I’ve made it an art form. I’ve developed detailed systems to calculate where I stand, based on GPA, body mass index, fashion, popularity, family income, etc. Based on this criteria, I have always fared somewhere in the safe middle.”

— Amy Reed