Top 80 Amy Zhang Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “The world is so big and beautiful and infinite that we don’t need to pretend.”

— Amy Zhang

2. “Had the world always been like this? Why had it seemed so much kinder when she was younger? Why had it seemed beautiful?”

— Amy Zhang

3. “Purification. You burn everything, you burn and burn and burn, and you start over.”

— Amy Zhang

4. “Gravity is our playmate, momentum is our friend. We are blurs of motion. We are racing, and we are both winning, because we do not race each other. We race the world, and as fast as it rotates, as fast as it revolves, we are faster.”

— Amy Zhang

5. “There had been silent tears and ones that barely leaked out. There were tears that heaved from her in great sobs. They all slipped through my fingers when I tried to catch them, and they fell around her in oceans.”

— Amy Zhang

6. “I used to think that destiny was fluid, because isn’t that the point of every Disney movie and Saturday-morning cartoon? You make your own choices. You decide how life goes. I always thought that your fate line would change if something happened, bam, something goes wrong and the line on your palm goes all wonky to reflect that. Nope. It still looks fine.”

— Amy Zhang

7. “That’s what high school’s for. You make plans and you don’t follow through. You dream and you can be brave when you’re dreaming, brave enough to imagine that there’s actually a yourself to find, brave enough to finish projects even though you were never born with endings, brave enough to plan volunteer trips even though you’d probably be dead of asphyxiation by the time you’re there because you’re always holding your breath as if that can keep you together.”

— Amy Zhang

8. “I put my hand in my pocket and squeeze my rocks and wonder if there is a word for the marks you get on your palm when you squeeze something so hard that the skin is on the verge of ripping.”

— Amy Zhang

9. “Please,” he whispers. “remember the sky.”

— Amy Zhang

10. “She needed a window, because she had broken her heart throwing it at locked doors.”

— Amy Zhang

11. “No one is strong enough to hold back so many tears.”

— Amy Zhang

12. “Funny things, aren’t they? People. They only believed in what they could see. Appearances were all that mattered, and no one would ever care what she was like on the inside. No one cared that she was breaking apart.”

— Amy Zhang

13. “Forgetting is the easy part. This should be unsurprising, but it surprises me. Forgetting was easy. Remembering is endless and it hurts, endlessly.”

— Amy Zhang

14. “Like I said, the world isn’t always fair, and sometimes we have to help it along.”

— Amy Zhang

15. “Some people die because the world does not deserve them. Liz Emerson on the other hand, did not deserve the world.”

— Amy Zhang

16. “He leans back in his chair and just looks at it all, the final diary of a dying girl.”

— Amy Zhang

17. “No one’s going to be at our hundred-year reunion. Hell, no one’s coming back for the five-year reunion.” That was probably true.”

— Amy Zhang

18. “It’s hard to lie when the truth is dying in front of you.”

— Amy Zhang

19. “Because Liz Emerson held so much darkness within her that closing her eyes didn’t make much of a difference at all.”

— Amy Zhang

20. “She was tired. Gravity pulled at her more aggressively than usual. When she closed her eyes, she could feel it, dragging her deeper, deeper. I would have pulled her back. I would have saved her from falling, but she didn’t see my hand.”

— Amy Zhang

21. “We fall asleep to fairy tales, and the world rotates and revolves and time passes and we grow up and we understand that they are false. There are not heroes and princesses and villains. It’s not that easy.”

— Amy Zhang

22. “When I crash, I will be inertia mass acceleration force gravity opposite equal everything. I will be nothing.”

— Amy Zhang

23. “It is then, when she releases her need to understand, that everything falls into place.”

— Amy Zhang

24. “If there’s one person in the world you should be with, there must be one person in the world you shouldn’t be with.”

— Amy Zhang

25. “I watched her carve her mistakes in stone, and they arranged themselves around her. They became a maze with walls that reached the sky. Because she learned from so few of them, she was lost. Because she didn’t have faith in anything, she didn’t try to find a way out. I watched her try to face her fears alone, too proud to ask for help, too stubborn to admit she was afraid, too small to fight them, too tired to fly away.”

— Amy Zhang

26. “Liz was afraid of silence, and she kept her fears clenched so tightly in her fists that they grew and grew and swallowed her whole.”

— Amy Zhang

27. “Her world was almost beautiful. She didn’t care that it was false.”

— Amy Zhang

28. “I am thinking about the way we love each other. I am thinking about our soul, one atom and bruised all over now that I have dragged it behind me with my muddy hands.”

— Amy Zhang

29. “Today the snow is white and swirling, the sky is close, and the world is so big and beautiful and infinite that we don’t need to pretend. All we know is already perfect.”

— Amy Zhang

30. “It is inconceivable that one day, her world will grow so dark and distant that when she raises her head, she will not be able to find it.”

— Amy Zhang

31. “I like water, though. I like the way it waits, and when you touch it, it both moves away and clings to your finger. I like the way it rises, like memory, or fear.”

— Amy Zhang

32. “Newton’s laws of physics can rarely be applied to the real world. There is more to life than cause and effect. Things just aren’t that simple.”

— Amy Zhang

33. “Some things are easier to forget than other things, I’m noticing.”

— Amy Zhang

34. “She had been desperate to feel something, anything. She needed a window, because she had broken her heart throwing it at locked doors.”

— Amy Zhang

35. “But there was something terrifying taking over her thoughts, and it wouldn’t leave. Out of seven billion sharing the planet with her, not one of them knew what was going through her head. Not one of them knew that she was lost. Not one of them asked.”

— Amy Zhang

36. “They were catalysts, the fingers that tipped the first domino. They started things that grew into nothing things that were much greater than themselves. A touch, a nudge in the wrong direction, and everyone fell down.”

— Amy Zhang

37. “In that moment, Liz Emerson felt that she was forever looking up at people who were much, much better than she could ever be, and the only thing she was really good at was pulling them down to her level.”

— Amy Zhang

38. “She looked around and saw all of the broken things in her wake, and then she looked inside herself ans saw the spidering cracks from the weight of all the things she had done.”

— Amy Zhang

39. “There was a certain freedom in being on the outside. He watched instead of being watched.”

— Amy Zhang

40. “It was the colors that had initially attracted her, the vibrant blue of the Bunsen flame and the dusty red of copper and the deep violet of permanganate. It was the logic of balanced equations, the certainty that when element A mixed with element B, compound C would appear. It was like predicting the future; it was like magic. Most of all, it was being: of having to be so careful with the hydrochloric acid, of accidentally burning herself while lighting a match, of discovering.”

— Amy Zhang

41. “We are nervous laughter and fast breath and faster heartbeats, alive alive alive.”

— Amy Zhang

42. “She wanted to go back. She wanted to be a little girl again, the one who thought getting high meant being pushed on the swing and pain was falling off her bike.”

— Amy Zhang

43. “I could understand a world where she was in Nepal, though I couldn’t figure out why she didn’t text me back. I could understand a world where she was distant but not lost. I couldn’t understand a world without her.”

— Amy Zhang

44. “It wasn’t the aloneness that Liz minded. It was the silence. It echoed.”

— Amy Zhang

45. “I don’t need to keep my misanthropy in check. It runs wild.”

— Amy Zhang

46. “Micah lives like an apology. He blushes when he breathes because he’s taking someone else’s air. It’s like all Micah wants is to disappear, and he thinks if he’s quiet enough, if he keeps his eyes on the ground and barely breathes and treads lightly, people will forget he exists.”

— Amy Zhang

47. “Gravity is our playmate, momentum is our friend. We are blurs of motion. We are racing, and we are both winning, because we do not race each other.”

— Amy Zhang

48. “It was quiet, deeply so, but it was the kind of quiet that lived and moved and changed, filled to the brim with crickets and wings and the sounds of late summer.”

— Amy Zhang

49. “She would be an object in motion that would stay in motion, even if it meant flattening everything in her path.”

— Amy Zhang

50. “I remember threading my fingers through his and pressing our life lines together.”

— Amy Zhang