Top 180 Jessa Hastings Quotes (2026 Update)
Page 2 of 4

51. “What are we then?” I ask defiantly, putting some distance between us which he crosses with one step anyway. He kisses my cheek. “Each other’s.”

— Jessa Hastings

52. “At the altar of the tree, I make a thousand soundless prayers and offerings, beg whoever’s listening to align our stars and let him be who I thought he was. If he can’t be that, I pray, may I be free of him and not have it kill me.”

— Jessa Hastings

53. “I don’t need us to live in one another’s pockets. I don’t need to be a part of his every waking moment, but I don’t like feeling like I’m being hidden.”

— Jessa Hastings

54. “I think fragrances are important. They leave a mark on your mind in a way other things can’t.”

— Jessa Hastings

55. “He says it’s just the family business but I call it the family sin. He doesn’t like it when I say that, but I think he thinks I’m right, he just doesn’t know what to do about it. Neither of us do. We are who we are, and what we are is all we’ve ever known.”

— Jessa Hastings

56. “I love you, he blinks. Prove it, I sigh.”

— Jessa Hastings

57. “Marsaili used to say something about how love can go sour like milk and then it turns to hate. Maybe we left our love out.”

— Jessa Hastings

58. “Is it horrible or miraculous that you can feel that feeling so many times throughout your life? Miraculous you survive, horrible you live to feel the world slipping out from under you again.”

— Jessa Hastings

59. “I think if we all could have peeked behind heaven’s curtains at that moment we’d have seen those old Fates knotting our threads together, me and Beej, in this pure, sunny, inexorable, undoable way. I said knotted, not tied. Because I don’t know whether we’ll ever come undone. Not easily, anyway.”

— Jessa Hastings

60. “She catches my eye from across the room, holding like our hands can’t.”

— Jessa Hastings

61. “What am I to you?” I lean back into him, pursing my mouth at the question. “The oxygen mask” – I glance back at him – “that falls down from the ceiling of the planes.”

— Jessa Hastings

62. “Edith Whisker’s version of “Home” starts playing.”

— Jessa Hastings

63. “But he can’t promise he won’t hurt me so I don’t know how to promise I’ll stay.”

— Jessa Hastings

64. “In another life I reckon I could have loved you.” I tilt my head, looking up at him. “In another life I would have let you.”

— Jessa Hastings

65. “I think surprise deaths are the worst. Do you ever think about it? How you love a person who’s made of mostly bone? Because it’s all I think about now. That the thing protecting the heart I would do anything for – that I’d die for – all that’s protecting it is a ribby cage made from collagen, calcium phosphate and calcium carbonate. That’s it. And some muscle.”

— Jessa Hastings

66. “Thoughts are like helium balloons – someone said that to me once. They drift into your mind, and you can choose to grab the string – hold on to the thought tightly, think of it, dwell on it, mull it over – or you can let it go.”

— Jessa Hastings

67. “I’ve been without him before, it’s not a life I’m interested in having.”

— Jessa Hastings

68. “Loving her like this is a kind of breathing that feels like dying.”

— Jessa Hastings

69. “Him with the starry eyes and the hair I loved to knot my hands up in. The most beautiful boy in every room, the great love of my life – how many loves do you get in a lifetime? I remember wondering that. How many people will look at me like he does, not just like I’m the sun but like I’m the whole goddamn universe. I remember hating him for doing this to us. I remember hating him for dying before we had a chance to be okay again, because I always thought we would be.”

— Jessa Hastings

70. “I think about kissing Magnolia Parks more than I think about anything else, literally in the world. It’s my go-to thought when my mind has a minute to spare.”

— Jessa Hastings

71. “If it wasn’t him, it would be you,” I tell him, for better and for worse. He blows some more air out of his mouth and catches my eye. “In another life, yeah?” I nod and offer him a weak smile. “I’ll meet you there.”

— Jessa Hastings

72. “Sam doesn’t do anything, doesn’t say anything-it’s not his fight, he doesn’t need to-but the light casts his shadow on me and I know he’s there and I’m not by myself, which is a very powerful thing to feel when you’ve felt by yourself most of your life.”

— Jessa Hastings

73. “He tried to smother the memories of our childhood. I tried to pull them apart.”

— Jessa Hastings

74. “A real man will allow you to be your whole entire self, with breathing room and space to change your mind and even evolve it.”

— Jessa Hastings

75. “He will be nothing to me even though he’s everything. I will make him pay for the rest of his life for tricking me into loving him unrequitedly.”

— Jessa Hastings

76. “I’m obsessed with him, I think he’s every constellation in the sky.”

— Jessa Hastings

77. “You’ll love him forever anyway.”

— Jessa Hastings

78. “And that – I’ll realise in eventual time – will be the first time that he lies to me.”

— Jessa Hastings

79. “She’s a sucker for a head tilt. She swallows heavy and I hate this. Hate whatever we are. Hate that I can’t just rush her and kiss her and take her in the shower. Hate this box she’s put me in, hate the walls she’s built around her. Hate these bones of a relationship, but it’s all we have left. And it’s the best part of my day.”

— Jessa Hastings

80. “You want to get over someone quickly?” I stare over at him. “Feel everything. Every shred of loss, everything you’re missing now that they’re gone. On lonely nights, be lonely. When you’re sad, look it in the eye. Every single memory I had of Storm, I ruminated on them for weeks on end and it felt like I fell into a fire, and then somehow, one day, after months of pain and months of forcing myself to feel all of it, I saw a picture of him and I didn’t feel like I was going to die anymore.”

— Jessa Hastings

81. “The problem with me and Parks is, I think we love each other more than ourselves.”

— Jessa Hastings

82. “It’s strange, don’t you think, the way we attach to people. The way our best intentions are cast aside, and the seed gets deeper into the soil of us than we planned and their place in our lives grow roots. I don’t think we’re supposed to love people lightly. I don’t think we’re supposed to love them a little bit and move on. Tom grew roots. It’s not his fault. I let him.”

— Jessa Hastings

83. “He’s leaving what we had behind, like he should. Like I should have let him so long ago. But I’ll miss him on my rainy days.”

— Jessa Hastings

84. “See you soon?” I say to our reflection. She’d give me a small smile, and I think she’d be a bit sad because I know how much she loves me. “Not too soon, please,” she’d say, because that’s not what she’d want for me. “Not too soon,” I say, nodding. “But one day again.” And then I close my little mirror, lay it down next to her ashes and let her go.”

— Jessa Hastings

85. “Parks, there’s not much about me that isn’t about you.”

— Jessa Hastings

86. “I am the fox and you are the flower, and you have tamed me.”

— Jessa Hastings

87. “Cut me and I bleed him.”

— Jessa Hastings

88. “Magnets. That’s what the boys say about us. Sometimes we’re the same pole, sometimes we’re opposites, but we move each other.”

— Jessa Hastings

89. “I’ll worry forever that I’ll never love another person the way I love him.”

— Jessa Hastings

90. “You’re all here to bury the smartest girl, the sharpest shooter in the whole wide world. But I’m burying my guiding light.”

— Jessa Hastings

91. “Normal for two broken hearts who can’t fit their pieces with anyone but each other.”

— Jessa Hastings

92. “The idea that it ends – that it all ends – that everything you spend your life doing and building toward one day amounts to actually nothing the second you take your last breath.”

— Jessa Hastings

93. “Do you believe children carry the sins of their fathers? Have you heard of that? Generational sins, ancestral sins – do you believe in those? My brother does. Because our dad did what he did – that’s Julian’s second pass. He’s already wearing Dad’s sins – what’s a few more?”

— Jessa Hastings

94. “Usually with her being quiet feels like I’m alone, and I never feel like I’m alone when I’m with someone else.”

— Jessa Hastings

95. “Because she’s yours. And even when she isn’t yours, she still is.”

— Jessa Hastings

96. “Are we just those people who always find a way back to each other no matter what?”

— Jessa Hastings

97. “Fifteen. She had me at one.”

— Jessa Hastings

98. “You can’t make someone love you how she loves you and then be as reckless as you are. It’s not fair –.”

— Jessa Hastings

99. “You can tell yourself you don’t even really want to be wanted by people like them anyway, but it isn’t true because the same way parents are supposed to want their kids, kids have a genetic predisposition to want to be wanted by them.”

— Jessa Hastings

100. “I can’t even look at him because I’m a flower and he’s the whole entire sun and he’ll wilt me away, I know he will.”

— Jessa Hastings