Top 50 Ashley Winstead Quotes (2026 Update)

1. “Sometimes, you really didn’t have to lift a finger to get exactly what you wanted. Sometimes, all you had to do was sit back and do nothing.”

— Ashley Winstead

2. “Even now, to this day, I think you were the love of my life. You were always talking about your dreams, back in college. Harvard this and DC that. Well, you want to know what my dream was? You. A real best friend.” My eyes burned. Caro’s voice softened. “I would have done anything for you.”

— Ashley Winstead

3. “Your body has a knowing. Like an antenna, attuned to tremors in the air, or a dowsing rod, tracing things so deeply buried you have no language for them yet.”

— Ashley Winstead

4. “It was strange, really, how your entire life could change just like that, from one second to the next. And there was no fireworks show, no dramatic tilting of the world on its axis to signify how everything had suddenly flipped upside down, and nothing would ever be the same.”

— Ashley Winstead

5. “I know you sneak Adderall to study all night even though econ makes you want to kill yourself. And now I know you charge thousands of dollars to a credit card you can’t afford just to fit in.”

— Ashley Winstead

6. “I wanted them to see perfection. I ached for it in the deep, dark core of me: to be so good I left other people in the dust.”

— Ashley Winstead

7. “Under the surface, in the cold, in the salt, swallowed by waves, I pressed my eyes shut, letting myself sink. And in that moment a wild wishing came over me. I wanted to stay here, submerged forever. Above the surface, all the days of my life were waiting like a promise. There was nothing but a blank slate, and anything goes, and what if. My life could mean anything, I could become anyone, as long as I didn’t break surface, as long as I stayed here, suspended, in this beautiful, infinite now.”

— Ashley Winstead

8. “We no longer exist for them, you and I. We are no longer a mirror for reflecting their anxieties, their desires. We are not saviors, or seductresses, or symbols. We exist only for ourselves. Tragic and sublime, ordinary and animal, in the mold of all humans, long before and long after us.”

— Ashley Winstead

9. “I’m telling you upfront. I need more. I need you over and over. So this is your out. Take it. Otherwise you’re mine, the way it should have been.”

— Ashley Winstead

10. “A woman who wanted was an ugly thing. I knew it made me childish and vulnerable. My whole life had taught me that lesson. But still. For one moment, laid out on the grass, all my ruined, pointless, pent-up wanting was too great to contain –.”

— Ashley Winstead

11. “Memories are powerful things. But – and this is important, my therapist said – so are the dark spaces. The things you choose, consciously or not, to repress. Always, they’re the things you need protection from. The too much: too terrifying, too shameful, too devastating. The things that, if allowed, would threaten the very core of who you’re supposed to be.”

— Ashley Winstead

12. “She’d asked if I thought it was possible to be perfect, and I’d amended that I didn’t need to be perfect, per se, as long as I was the best.”

— Ashley Winstead

13. “Or maybe I realized people are rarely interested in another person’s pain – so you have to dress it up accordingly.”

— Ashley Winstead

14. “The rip of the match against the box, my hate becoming tangible, sparking and catching fire. The spike of adrenaline right before I tossed the match, turning my body into an inferno a second before the world became light and heat.”

— Ashley Winstead

15. “Consider this a lesson in being an adult. If you go to a boy’s house dressed like an invitation, take shots and flirt with him all night, give every indication of wanting to sleep with him, what do you think he’s going to do? Ms. Hargrove can’t go crying wolf over every sexual encounter she regrets, or else cops would spend all our time chasing hungover college kids after a bad lay.”

— Ashley Winstead

16. “I wanted to become big enough, important enough, to never really die. Then I would never get trapped in a hole in the ground like my dad, with no one around to care.”

— Ashley Winstead

17. “People are constantly telling you who they are if you’re willing to step back and listen.”

— Ashley Winstead

18. “If only it was always like this. If beauty was purely a power and not a target, a vulnerability that could draw the wolves and put you at their mercy.”

— Ashley Winstead

19. “Let him go. That was what the world expected. What they always expect of women – grace, forgiveness, moral superiority. We were supposed to look our rapists in the eyes, the men who’d tortured us, and show them mercy.”

— Ashley Winstead

20. “It was all so clear now, so terrifyingly obvious. I was the villain; I always had been. It explained everything – why I’d never gotten what I wanted, no matter how hard I’d tried. It wasn’t because life was unfair, or not working the way it should. I’d had it backwards my whole life: I wasn’t the princess, set upon by misfortune; I was the witch. And life had unfolded the way it was supposed to, giving me what I deserved.”

— Ashley Winstead

21. “Behold Caroline Rodriguez, finally reading someone right. Finally willing to believe the worst, and of her best friend, to boot. What extraordinarily bad timing.”

— Ashley Winstead

22. “I’d had it backwards my whole life: I wasn’t the princess, set upon by misfortune; I was the witch. And life had unfolded the way it was supposed to, giving me what I deserved.”

— Ashley Winstead

23. “Once, I’d kneaded dough naked on my hands and knees, and I’d liked it.”

— Ashley Winstead

24. “Happiness? That was a luxury I’d never been able to afford.”

— Ashley Winstead

25. “And I knew, with all my heart and soul, that I’d loved him, and he’d been good and wicked, and in the dark, secret part of me, we were so much the same.”

— Ashley Winstead

26. “I’d pretended I was fine, pretended I’d moved on, but the truth was, the past was still open inside me, like a half-cracked door, because it was a raw, unhealed wound.”

— Ashley Winstead

27. “Those girls are the best. They tell themselves they’re being sexually liberated when I take them home and chain them in my basement. Owning their sexuality, and all that.” “Maybe they are,” I said, trying not to visualize.”

— Ashley Winstead

28. “Wanting is dangerous. The less you want, the safer you’ll be.”

— Ashley Winstead

29. “You are a living, breathing story made up of the moments in time you cherish, all strung together, and those you hide. The moments that seem lost.”

— Ashley Winstead

30. “A reader, then.” He eyed me. “Dangerous quality in a girl.”

— Ashley Winstead

31. “There would never be another antagonist more insidious than her own mind.”

— Ashley Winstead

32. “The law is nuanced and complicated, and I like nuanced and complicated.”

— Ashley Winstead

33. “What would all these people – these Duquette students – think? Surely, they would understand the message my father was sending, not just to me anymore, but to all of them.”

— Ashley Winstead

34. “I’m part of it. Not a sinner or a saint – just another creature. Mud and pollen and teeth and sinew. If there is a God, some higher power, it’s here in these woods.”

— Ashley Winstead

35. “This is why I read all day. To escape the blasted world.”

— Ashley Winstead

36. “Maybe I’d performed for so long I wasn’t capable of recognizing my real feelings. Were there even such things, or was everyone always reacting in ways we understood we were supposed to? When did the performance ever end?”

— Ashley Winstead

37. “If I was born bait, I would at least dangle myself.”

— Ashley Winstead

38. “Laws, religion, civil society – they were just veneers, constructions put in place by the powerful to tame us animals, impose control.”

— Ashley Winstead

39. “That’s the upside of being the pastor’s daughter and the Devil’s son, two outcasts who became friends the way we did. From the start, nothing has been off-limits.”

— Ashley Winstead

40. “Because he was human and started dying the minute he was born. Because it was always going to happen, and it was always going to hurt.”

— Ashley Winstead

41. “In a million years, I never would’ve guessed that the first time I’d fall in love, it would be with the earth itself.”

— Ashley Winstead

42. “Everything these last ten years has paled compared to it. I’m scared college was the last time I was really alive, the way you’re supposed to be, and I’ll never get it back.”

— Ashley Winstead

43. “I never realized how much I loved the color green until I met you,” he said quickly, and my heart raced.”

— Ashley Winstead

44. “In that moment, I gave myself over completely. I worshipped them. I died and started new, right there in.”

— Ashley Winstead

45. “Amazing how, even though sometimes I thought I hated my parents, their commandments still wormed their way so deep into my subconscious that obeying them was more muscle memory than choice. That had to be the worst kind of prison – the one whose bars were buried under your skin, invisible cages around your heart and mind.”

— Ashley Winstead

46. “Christ, Heather.” Courtney shooed the boys away and righted her friend. “What’s your damage?”

— Ashley Winstead

47. “You were playing by their rules, Shay. Capitulating to the same patriarchal system that sexualized you so young. Even if you’d felt in control, it would’ve been an illusion.”

— Ashley Winstead

48. “I’d finally accepted that mystery is at the heart of love. That it’s our deep yearning to know the ones we love in ways that are ultimately impossible... We will never have long enough – and that keeps us bound to them, forever chasing.”

— Ashley Winstead

49. “Just because you’ve believed something your whole life doesn’t mean it’s right.”

— Ashley Winstead

50. “Caro. My truest friend. The one who’d never left my side, who loved me as much today as the day we graduated. The guilt threatened to overwhelm me.”

— Ashley Winstead