Top 450 Jennifer Niven Quotes (2024 Update)
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401. “No.” Bren is shaking her head so hard and fast, it looks as if she’s having a seizure. “You don’t dress to please a girl – especially not a girl like that. You dress to please yourself. If she doesn’t like you for you, then you don’t need her.”

— Jennifer Niven

402. “You deserve better. I can’t promise you I’ll stay around, not because I don’t want to. It’s hard to explain. I’m a fuckup. I’m broken, and no one can fix it. I’ve tried. I’m still trying. I can’t love anyone because it’s not fair to anyone who loves me back.”

— Jennifer Niven

403. “Please, earth, swallow me whole.”

— Jennifer Niven

404. “He throws his arms out over his head, fists clenched, and shouts: ‘Open your eyes and look at me! I’m right bloody here!’ He shouts all the things he hates and wants to change until his voice is hoarse. Then he nods over at me. ‘Your turn.”

— Jennifer Niven

405. “You know what I like about driving? The forward motion of it, the propulsion of it, like you might go anywhere.”

— Jennifer Niven

406. “He knows as well as I do what the Why is. It’s everything changing when I was ten. It’s the bullying and the fear. So much fear of everything, but mostly death. Sudden, out-of-the-blue death. It’s also me being terrified of life. It’s the giant emptiness in my chest. It’s touching my face or my skin and feeling nothing. This is the Why of me staying home in the first place. And the Why of me eating. And the Why of me ending up here. But that doesn’t mean I want to die.”

— Jennifer Niven

407. “We kiss until my lips are numb, stopping ourselves on the very edge of Someday, saying not yet, not here, even though it takes willpower I didn’t know I had. My mind is spinning with him and with the unexpected Almost of today.”

— Jennifer Niven

408. “It’s so lovely to be lovely to the one I love.”

— Jennifer Niven

409. “I feel a lot of nothing.”

— Jennifer Niven

410. “His hand is firm and warm, and somehow, big as it is, it fits with mine.”

— Jennifer Niven

411. “I say, ‘This is quite a room you have, Josh Raymond,’ I am trying to let it bother me because jealousy is a mean, unpleasant feeling that only eats you from the inside, and I do not need to stand here, an almost-eighteen-year-old with a really sexy girlfriend, even if she’s not allowed to see me anymore, and worry about the fact that my stepbrother seems to own thousands of Legos.”

— Jennifer Niven

412. “Come on. Let me have it. Don’t disappear in there.′ I mean inside herself, where I’ll never get to her.”

— Jennifer Niven

413. “I’m five minutes late to Russian literature, where Mrs. Mahone and her wig assign us a ten-page paper on The Brothers Karamazov.”

— Jennifer Niven

414. “Suddenly I’m having one of those moments that you have after losing someone – when you feel as if you’ve been kicked in the stomach and all your breath is gone, and you might never get it back.”

— Jennifer Niven

415. “I didn’t know that my life forever changing would be because you loved me and then left, and in such a final way. So I guess there was no Great Manifesto after all, even though you made me believe there was.”

— Jennifer Niven

416. “My hand feels cold without his.”

— Jennifer Niven

417. “Finch swims toward shore and comes walking toward me. I try not to stare at him, dripping wet and naked, so I watch the crane, the sky, anything but him.”

— Jennifer Niven

418. “Like most people in the Midwest, Embryo doesn’t believe in humor, especially when it pertains to sensitive subjects.”

— Jennifer Niven

419. “That’s how she used to feel before any of this happened – strong and sturdy, like she could withstand a tornado.”

— Jennifer Niven

420. “I wish my heart wouldn’t beat so fast.”

— Jennifer Niven

421. “Not here. Not now.”

— Jennifer Niven

422. “That’s another lie. That’s not even his real handwriting. There is nothing about this boy that is neat and careful.”

— Jennifer Niven

423. “Did you kids have fun?” she asks, and we know she’s hoping we’ll beg for permission to never go there again. Decca.”

— Jennifer Niven

424. “Is this part of the geography project? Are you wandering the riverbed or just each other?”

— Jennifer Niven

425. “I like to think that the colors and sounds and words have nothing to do with him, that they’re all me and my own brilliant, complicated, buzzing, humming, soaring roaring diving, godlike brain” -Finch.”

— Jennifer Niven

426. “Often, mental and emotional illnesses go undiagnosed because the person suffering symptoms is too ashamed to speak up, or because their loved ones either fail to or choose not to recognize the signs.”

— Jennifer Niven

427. “For now, why not write things down where no one will see it?”

— Jennifer Niven

428. “Sometimes things end, even if you don’t want them to.”

— Jennifer Niven

429. “I’ve always thought you should be able to freeze time. This way you could hit the Pause button at a really good point in your life so that nothing changes. Think about it. Loved ones don’t die. You don’t age. You go to bed and wake up the next morning to find everything just as you left it. No surprises.”

— Jennifer Niven

430. “Life is an accumulation of aches. They fill you up and take your breath away and you think you’ll never breathe again, but before you know it, you are just words on paper, gone quiet and asleep until someone finds those words and reads them.”

— Jennifer Niven

431. “Because it always ends the same, right? You have a good time and they have a good time and everyone’s having fun, and then once the chase is over, suddenly they start chasing after someone else like you never existed. Besides, I like being me too much.”

— Jennifer Niven

432. “Trapped behind the wall I’ve built around myself, unable to move or breathe or do anything but keep building it up around me, brick by brick, fast as I can.”

— Jennifer Niven

433. “There’s beauty in every story. And there’s a story in everything.”

— Jennifer Niven

434. “The thing is, there are good days and bad days. I feel almost guilty saying they aren’t all bad.”

— Jennifer Niven

435. “It can get kind of nerve-racking when you realise how isolated you are from the actual world here. But all the scary stuff doesn’t really compare to getting lost in your own mind.”

— Jennifer Niven

436. “If anybody could have saved me, it would have been you.”

— Jennifer Niven

437. “It takes many, many coats to cover the red. No matter what I do, it seeps right through, like the walls are bleeding.”

— Jennifer Niven

438. “You are wanted. You are necessary. You are loved.”

— Jennifer Niven

439. “I want to get away from all these labels. ‘I’m OCD,’ ‘I’m depressed,’ ‘I’m a cutter,’ they say, like these are the things that define them.”

— Jennifer Niven

440. “It’s easy to give everyone what they want. What’s expected. The problem with doing this is you lose sight of where you truly begin and where the fake you, the one who tries to be everything to everyone, ends.”

— Jennifer Niven

441. “It’s funny how the bad things stay with you and the good things sometimes get lost.”

— Jennifer Niven

442. “I treat water on the surface under the wide, open sky and the sun and all that blue, which reminds me of Theodore Finch, just like everything else reminds me of him, and I think of my own epitath, still to be written, and all the places I’ll wander. No longer rooted, but gold, flowing. I feel a thousand capacities spring in me.”

— Jennifer Niven

443. “We’ve done “I love you more than’ since we were ten, because we love each other beyond three words and needed to find a way to say it.”

— Jennifer Niven

444. “Mom used to say that a picture wasn’t worth anything if it didn’t produce a reaction, that it takes talent to capture feeling with an image.”

— Jennifer Niven

445. “Words can be bullies.”

— Jennifer Niven

446. “I don’t want to hear this. Whatever this is. I want to forget I’ve heard any of it. I want to reach inside my ears and grab the words and fling them at her.”

— Jennifer Niven

447. “I think about how amazing it is that you can have someone that close to you, that for the first time you literally aren’t alone in your body anymore. Yet somehow you can still feel lonely.”

— Jennifer Niven

448. “Maybe it isn’t the room that’s different. Maybe it’s me.”

— Jennifer Niven

449. “I’ve never realised how hard we are on our bodies. I think, Why are we so mean to ourselves? Why aren’t we happy with what we have?”

— Jennifer Niven

450. “Cheeky wanker.” He calls me this even though I’m no longer British.”

— Jennifer Niven