Top 180 Courtney Summers Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “Later, after he drops me off at home, it feels like the world has shifted a little. It’s just different enough that when I look at the girl reflected in the mirror in my room, it’s like meeting someone new.”

— Courtney Summers

102. “Funny how the last thing we want the world to see is almost the first thing to show.”

— Courtney Summers

103. “I reach for the pettiest thing I can think of because no one has a hard time believing how petty a girl can be.”

— Courtney Summers

104. “It’s your last year, Grey,” she says. “Make a difference for your school.” I’d burn this place to the ground before I ever willingly make a difference for it, but I’m smarter than saying that out loud and she should be smarter than tempting me.”

— Courtney Summers

105. “You can’t buy people with your pain. They’ll just want away from it” -Sadie.”

— Courtney Summers

106. “Don’t divide me into before and after.”

— Courtney Summers

107. “He shoves his hands in his pockets, which is okay by me because his hands are forever distracting, all the things they could do.”

— Courtney Summers

108. “I make sure to tell her I love her because more and more, I’m thinking about the last things I say before I leave.”

— Courtney Summers

109. “And there was so much time in the school, time to weigh words, turn them into things like I’m here because they’re not, so I have to make it mean something. I’m afraid everything I was is gone and all that’s left is everything I’m not.”

— Courtney Summers

110. “The truth is, I don’t really know if she could help me, but I know she really wants to believe she could and I know she wants me to come to her believing it too. My love should be knowing this about her and being able to pretend, but I can.”

— Courtney Summers

111. “I’m hazy on remembering or maybe I’m just tired or maybe a part of my brain wants to sabotage me. page-208.”

— Courtney Summers

112. “I have never seen a more desperate symbol of hope since the world ended and I’ve never felt the world more desperate to make a mockery of it.”

— Courtney Summers

113. “Sometimes I feel hunted by my grief. It circles me, stalks me. It’s always in my periphery. Sometimes I can fake it out. Sometimes I make myself go so still, it can’t sense that I’m there anymore and it goes away. I do that right now.”

— Courtney Summers

114. “He’s the boy who stopped and I’m the girl he stopped for and what happens to her, if he goes away?”

— Courtney Summers

115. “I stood over her crib and listened to her breathing, watching the rise and fall of her tiny chest. I pressed my palm against it and felt myself through her. She was breathing, alive. And I was too.”

— Courtney Summers

116. “I spot a fly floating on the surface of the water, its little legs pumping madly as it fights to keep itself afloat. I know that feeling.”

— Courtney Summers

117. “I don’t know why he still cares. What a stupid thing it is, to care about a girl.”

— Courtney Summers

118. “Jake and Chris talk through art and discover they have so much in common it’s amazing. Like, They Could Be Boyfriends If They Didn’t Like Vaginas So Much Amazing.”

— Courtney Summers

119. “I don’t know why it’s the girls who always seem to have to take on that kind of burden.”

— Courtney Summers

120. “And let me tell you something about Farfield police: they don’t give a good God damn.”

— Courtney Summers

121. “I want to feel this. I need it to hurt for me to feel it, I think.”

— Courtney Summers

122. “Whatever’s between us is that kind of new.”

— Courtney Summers

123. “He looks at me and I make myself look back. I need the girl he was looking for to be the one he’s seeing now.”

— Courtney Summers

124. “My dad always said we’re at the mercy of something greater than ourselves and whatever humanity we don’t show to others, we pay for. We’re paying for.”

— Courtney Summers

125. “People have to live with things they don’t want to live with all the time, but – how?”

— Courtney Summers

126. “Montgomery is almost more than I can understand because it’s so much more than it ever occurred to me to want.”

— Courtney Summers

127. “This is what pain feels like when it’s happening now and I beg my body to know this difference. It won’t listen to me.”

— Courtney Summers

128. “If it had been me instead of Penny, no one would call me a light. No, they’d think of me the way they think of me now, think of it as some kind of natural conclusion to my story, sad, maybe, deserved it, well no, of course, no one does, but. That girl. You can see it. It’s written on her. They wrote it on her.”

— Courtney Summers

129. “It’s something my body does without checking with my head first, like the obligation to be nice to him is greater than myself.”

— Courtney Summers

130. “Like I’d let you captain me.”

— Courtney Summers

131. “She can’t deny that for months she imagined his son’s hands on her body, in that truck, in a bed, anywhere. She pictured it over and over except in her head, she wanted it and her eyes were open.”

— Courtney Summers

132. “She hates her heart, that misguided organ in her chest. Why didn’t it warn her?”

— Courtney Summers

133. “I stare at the crowbar between us. You’ve never truly felt the weight of something like that until you’ve destroyed someone with it.”

— Courtney Summers

134. “My eyes are wide and wild and I can’t see beyond them. I can only see what they’ve seen.”

— Courtney Summers

135. “Dad was thirsty, not given to great displays of affection, like his father and his father’s father before him. A long line of self-indulgent men who couldn’t give love but lived to take it, which isn’t the same as receiving it. They were all in so much pain and that’s always the perfect excuse.”

— Courtney Summers

136. “It hurts being on the outside of something so honest. I want it, but I don’t know how I can have it when I’m so angry, and I feel so far from finished.”

— Courtney Summers

137. “It hits me: that’s going to die with me, that story. My story. My family, everyone in the school, their stories too–I’m the last person who could tell them and if I die, they’re gone.”

— Courtney Summers

138. “Sloane is sleeping. I sit down on the edge of the bed and listen to her breathing and then I match my breath to hers because if she’s still here, so am I.”

— Courtney Summers

139. “Cardboard cutouts of cheerleaders operated by arthritic monkeys would move more fluidly.”

— Courtney Summers

140. “It’s amazing how bad you can make the truth sound. As long as you keep it partially recognizable when you spit it out, a crowd will eat it up without even thinking about how hard you chewed on it first.”

— Courtney Summers

141. “I think it isn’t enough to survive for the sake of surviving. There has to be more to it than just that.”

— Courtney Summers

142. “He came here quiet – not shy, but removed, above it all. Like he just didn’t care about us.”

— Courtney Summers

143. “I’m here because they’re not, so I have to make it mean something. I’m afraid everything I was is gone and all that’s left is everything I’m not.”

— Courtney Summers

144. “There’s a miracle there, but there’s something so awful about it too, bringing someone into all this now, this world where a girl can’t even trust a drink that passes her lips. I can’t figure out the kind of heart it takes to do something like that.”

— Courtney Summers

145. “It’s when my body decides to remind me it can do more than I’ll ever want it to, it is so painful.”

— Courtney Summers

146. “What is about to be offered to you has never been offered to anyone before.”

— Courtney Summers

147. “Because Tina and I have never conducted ourselves in such an unladylike manner before, Diaz says we’re getting off easier than we would have otherwise. I want to ask her what unladylike means.”

— Courtney Summers

148. “It’s kind of like stumbling upon the scene of an accident. Once you’ve looked, you’re part of it. Especially if you walk away.”

— Courtney Summers

149. “Having a sister, mom says, is a place only the two of them will share, made of secrets they never have to say aloud – but if they did, it would be in a language only the two of them could speak. Having a sister is a promise no one but the two of you can make – and no one but the two of you can break.”

— Courtney Summers

150. “How do you say that physically, you’re okay, when everything is not.”

— Courtney Summers