Top 180 Courtney Summers Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “People don’t change. They just get better at hiding who they really are.”

— Courtney Summers

2. “I’m not afraid to be alone like you are.”

— Courtney Summers

3. “I woke up and the last piece of my heart disappeared. I opened my eyes and I felt it go.”

— Courtney Summers

4. “Is this what it’s like to get close to other people – you do something insane together and then you have to share everything even if you don’t really want to?”

— Courtney Summers

5. “Time passes too quickly when you’re getting ready to do something you don’t want to do.”

— Courtney Summers

6. “A whole world exists outside of that hellhole.”

— Courtney Summers

7. “I’m dying. I am dying. I have finally achieved what I set out to do. My heart is splitting open and I breathe in but no air gets into my lungs.”

— Courtney Summers

8. “I’m afraid everything I was is gone and all that’s left is everything I’m not.”

— Courtney Summers

9. “I don’t know why this has to be so hard, why I haven’t been through enough. It should be easy. It should have always been easy.”

— Courtney Summers

10. “And that I miss her, that I need her, and this kind of missing, this kind of need, the kind of emptiness it leaves behind is worse than waking up one day and finding the whole world has collapsed in on itself, that I was over longer before it was.”

— Courtney Summers

11. “How does it feel to know that even at my worst, you’re still not good enough?”

— Courtney Summers

12. “I’m going to kill a man. I’m going to steal the light from his eyes. I want to watch it go out. You aren’t supposed to answer violence with more violence but sometimes I think violence is the only answer. It’s no less than he did to Mattie, so it’s no less than.”

— Courtney Summers

13. “Every little thing about you can be a weapon, if you’re clever enough.”

— Courtney Summers

14. “My dad used to say makeup was a shallow girl’s sport, but it’s not. It’s armor.”

— Courtney Summers

15. “It was a terrible thing, sure, but we live in a world that has no shortage of terrible things. You can’t stop for all of them.”

— Courtney Summers

16. “And Sadie, if you’re out there, please let me know. Because I can’t take another dead girl.”

— Courtney Summers

17. “Everyone should know – there’s no such thing as a decent human being. It’s just an illusion. And when it’s gone, it’s really gone.”

— Courtney Summers

18. “The silence stretches between us. Words aren’t so easy to come by, after his admission. It takes him a while to dig some up.”

— Courtney Summers

19. “My eyes burn, and tears slip down my cheeks and I can’t even imagine how pathetic I look. Girl with a busted face, torn-up arms, begging for the opportunity to save other girls. Why do I have to beg for that?”

— Courtney Summers

20. “I don’t believe in forgiveness. I think if you hurt someone, it becomes part of you both. Each of you just has to live with it and the person you hurt gets to decide if they want to give you the chance to do it again. If they do and you’re a good person, you won’t make the same mistakes. Just whole new ones.”

— Courtney Summers

21. “The sooner you make a mistake and learn to live with it, the better. You’re not responsible for everything. You can’t control the way things end up.”

— Courtney Summers

22. “But love is complicated, it’s messy. It can inspire selflessness, selfishness, our greatest accomplishments and our hardest mistakes. It brings us together and it can just as easily drive us apart.”

— Courtney Summers

23. “I mean, you know how it is. You chase a bottle of sleeping pills with a bottle of Jack Daniel’s and life’s never the same, no matter how many times you try to tell people it was just an accident.”

— Courtney Summers

24. “I wish his darkness lived outside of him, because you have to know it’s there to see it. Like all real monsters, he hides in plain sight.”

— Courtney Summers

25. “I realized pretty early on that the who didn’t really matter so much. That anybody who listens to me, I end up loving them just a little.”

— Courtney Summers

26. “I wish I didn’t have a body, sometimes.”

— Courtney Summers

27. “We eat breakfast, lunch, and dinner to the soundtrack of our own impending death.”

— Courtney Summers

28. “How do you forgive the people who are supposed to protect you?”

— Courtney Summers

29. “I’ve been variations of hurt my whole life.”

— Courtney Summers

30. “I always forget fear is a conquerable thing but I learn it over and over again and that, I guess, is better than never learning it.”

— Courtney Summers

31. “How do you forgive the people who are supposed to protect you? Sometimes, I don’t know what I miss more; everything I’ve lost or everything I never had.”

— Courtney Summers

32. “Anytime something bad happens to a woman close to me, it’s how I think. I have a daughter.” “You have a son.” She shakes her head. “It’s not the same.”

— Courtney Summers

33. “They listened to the soundtrack of their impending doom.”

— Courtney Summers

34. “Times like these, you go so far out of your way to assure yourself you’re not alone. You memorize the person you’re with: the way they breathe, the way they move, the warmth of their body. All these things, you reach for every second of the day and when they’re gone, you don’t even have to open your eyes to know it. She’s gone.”

— Courtney Summers

35. “I’m going to kill a man. I’m going to steal the light from his eyes. I want to watch it go out.”

— Courtney Summers

36. “When I was nineteen and Mattie was thirteen, Keith came back. I turn the switchblade one more time in my sweaty palm, feeling the weight of its neat black handle and the unforgiving blade tucked inside. It was his, a long time ago. It’s mine now. I’m going to carve my name into his soul.”

— Courtney Summers

37. “Penny Young is the most perfect girl you know and those kinds of girls, they’re put on this earth to break you. Peel back her skin and you can see her poison. Peel back mine, you can still see traces of where her poison’s been.”

— Courtney Summers

38. “I hate the people who live here. May Beth always told me I can’t do that; I can’t hate people for having more than me, but she’s wrong. I can. I do.”

— Courtney Summers

39. “You wanted the truth. Or are you afraid of it now?”

— Courtney Summers

40. “You’re not responsible for everything, Parker. You can’t control the way things end up. Stop trying.”

— Courtney Summers

41. “She died, Penny, you know that? You know all the ways you can kill a girl? God, there are so many.”

— Courtney Summers

42. “Turning myself into the idea of a girl. Or, an idea of an idea. A manic pixie dream, I guess. The kind everyone says they’re tired of, but I don’t know that they really mean it. The girl nobody ends up loving long or loving well, but nobody wants to give up, either.”

— Courtney Summers

43. “I hide in the bathroom, in the stall farthest from the door and become a tableau of a girl crouched stupidly on a toilet seat, so she won’t be seen. Over the hour, girls come in and out, in and out. I can’t stand every boring, worthless piece of conversation I overhear because they make me wish I could be a part of them, be some nobody girl with nothing to say.”

— Courtney Summers

44. “Write it down today, put it away, make sense of it tomorrow.”

— Courtney Summers

45. “If I could speak I’d tell her I hate her. I hate you. I want my silence to carry that to her, somehow, because she should know it forever and ever amen.”

— Courtney Summers

46. “A used bookstore. Paperback carnage. Books ripped apart, spines broken pages everywhere. Stories so far past their usefulness.”

— Courtney Summers

47. “Waiting around to be saved is like waiting to die and I have done more of both than anyone else in the room.”

— Courtney Summers

48. “I press my hands against my face and split myself in two. Push away the side that’s the truth because that’s the side that wants to be angry at him for how wrong he is because of all the things he doesn’t know. I focus on the side I’ve shown to him. There’s so much missing, but it’s better that it’s missing. And as long as it’s missing, that makes everything he’s saying to me now – right.”

— Courtney Summers

49. “I have never been kissed the way I want to be kissed and I have never been touched the way I want to be touched. I don’t often let myself think of it, but ever since I saw that video, I can’t seem to stop.”

— Courtney Summers

50. “I’m struck by how amazing it is and how sad that makes me, because I’ve never seen that. He’s not like that around me. The way his mouth quirks and lights up his eyes. He should smile more often. It’s so innocent.”

— Courtney Summers