Top 180 Lauren DeStefano Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “She would do anything, anything to belong to his son after a lifetime of belonging to no one at all.”

— Lauren DeStefano

152. “There are pillow creases on her face, and she cringes whenever she moves her legs.”

— Lauren DeStefano

153. “I watch the ashes swim around like dandelion puffs, making swirls where bodies and walls once stood.”

— Lauren DeStefano

154. “And everywhere girls, tumbling from trees like orange blossoms and hitting the earth with sickening thuds. They crack open.”

— Lauren DeStefano

155. “They are paper cutouts rather than people, Pram thought. They are shadows with black dots for eyes and grim lines for mouths. They almost resemble the dead, but not quite.”

— Lauren DeStefano

156. “It doesn’t matter how much his mother loves him; love is not enough to keep any of us alive.”

— Lauren DeStefano

157. “He sits next to me, careful to avoid my hair that’s splayed out around my head like blood. A bullet to the forehead, boom, blond waves everywhere.”

— Lauren DeStefano

158. “Times like this, when she slips her hand into mine and holds on tight, and our husband becomes just a shadow in the doorway.”

— Lauren DeStefano

159. “We writers are resilient souls.”

— Lauren DeStefano

160. “It’s never right to give up on someone.”

— Lauren DeStefano

161. “He was now working his way through the many shades of grief. Sadness made everything gray, he’d learned, but there were different types of gray, some darker than others. There were dark spots in his memories he wasn’t brave enough to enter.”

— Lauren DeStefano

162. “I see an ocean that’s spilled out of a wineglass, its body clear and sparkling and folding over itself. I see a ribbon of sand.”

— Lauren DeStefano

163. “A strange thing, words. Once they’re said, it’s hard to imagine they’re untrue.”

— Lauren DeStefano

164. “I should not have loved my daughter as I did. Not in this world in which nothing lives for long. You children are flies. You are roses. You multiply and die.”

— Lauren DeStefano

165. “Death itself is no match for you. The day you were born, it shrank away in fear.”

— Lauren DeStefano

166. “The clouds took on the shape of dancers; from somewhere far off, Pram heard music before the clouds became normal again.”

— Lauren DeStefano

167. “I’m suddenly finding it hard to know the difference between nightmares and consciousness.”

— Lauren DeStefano

168. “We were his disposable things. Brought to him like cattle. Stripped of what made us sisters or daughters or children. There was nothing that he could take from us – our genes, our bones, our wombs – that would ever satisfy him. There was no other way that we would be free.”

— Lauren DeStefano

169. “None of the wives mention the security guards by the door, who will probably tackle us to the ground if we try to leave without our husbands.”

— Lauren DeStefano

170. “I start trying to stay unconscious. The problem with this is that no amount of willpower can change the reality.”

— Lauren DeStefano

171. “Kettle thingies. Yum.”

— Lauren DeStefano

172. “Vaughn is talking about the heat, and his voice is so excited that it breaks into whispers at times. He loves his madness the way a bird loves the sky.”

— Lauren DeStefano

173. “They’re dead. We’re alive. We have things to do.”

— Lauren DeStefano

174. “We didn’t make ourselves,” she says. “We aren’t the greatest things to exist. I can’t believe that. I won’t believe that. We have too many faults.”

— Lauren DeStefano

175. “Forget who you are and what you think is there, and you’ll discover things that don’t exist to be known.”

— Lauren DeStefano

176. “I want to make the world into something better so that he can be okay.”

— Lauren DeStefano

177. “Hope, that risky, illustrious thing. It should have gone extinct by now, but we keep it alive.”

— Lauren DeStefano

178. “I hold on because you never know in this place when something good will be taken away.”

— Lauren DeStefano

179. “I was taught to speak and write a dozen languages, but there isn’t a word for what you mean to me.”

— Lauren DeStefano

180. “Living in a place like this, she must have learned how to see all the monsters that can hide a person.”

— Lauren DeStefano

181. “There are so many of us, so many girls. The world wants us for our wombs or our bodies, or it doesn’t want us at all. It steals us, destroys us, piles us like dying cattle in circus tents and leaves us lying in filth and perfume until we’re wanted again.”

— Lauren DeStefano

182. “We’ll squeeze every second that we can from our lives, because we’re young, and we have plenty of years to grow. We’ll grow until we’re braver. We’ll grow until our bones ache and our skin wrinkles and our hair goes white, and until our hearts decide, at last, that it’s time to stop.”

— Lauren DeStefano

183. “I wonder what it’s like for her, looking so much like a dead girl.”

— Lauren DeStefano

184. “She wished that when her heart was beating double, she could give one of those hearts to him and then press her ear to his chest and feel it beating.”

— Lauren DeStefano

185. “The seeds are tiny, unborn things, and I resent them. They’ll be planted and they’ll grow into exactly what they’re meant to be.”

— Lauren DeStefano

186. “When you were little, you were like a question mark with eyes.”

— Lauren DeStefano

187. “Maybe I’d hoped for something magical or historic, but all I see is greed.”

— Lauren DeStefano

188. “There was a desperate undercurrent to our marriage – a feeling of being in a dream from which I couldn’t seem to awaken. A nagging sense that my life, laid out so neatly like the clothes Deirdre left on my divan, was no longer my own.”

— Lauren DeStefano

189. “Did you tell freedom hello for me?”

— Lauren DeStefano

190. “I wanted so badly to tell him, but something about that entire night seemed so beautiful, so bizarre, that I didn’t trust it with my secrets.”

— Lauren DeStefano

191. “I liked just being with you. I liked the way you breathed when you were asleep. I liked when you took the champagne glass from my hand. I liked how your fingers were always too long for your gloves.”

— Lauren DeStefano

192. “This isn’t living, what all of us are doing. We drive down long, dilapidated back roads.”

— Lauren DeStefano

193. “There are different sorts of geniuses. You’re one too. I’ve never met a person with your ability to make peace” -Judas.”

— Lauren DeStefano

194. “There is a need, in every world, to believe in things that cannot be seen.”

— Lauren DeStefano

195. “His three wives are huddled together on the bare mattress, one of them dying; when we’re together, we form an alliance he can’t touch. He’s scared to even try.”

— Lauren DeStefano

196. “The sullen boy sitting before me is not my husband, and the girl he is fretting over isn’t me, will never be me.”

— Lauren DeStefano

197. “Perhaps it’s different for girls,” Wil said. “’ We’re told who we’re meant to be, and we strive to be just that, even if we know it isn’t right. Love is used as a weapon against us. When we don’t do as we’re told, it gets taken away, and when we do, it’s returned again like a treasured doll.”

— Lauren DeStefano

198. “She’s outgrowing her memories. We both are.”

— Lauren DeStefano

199. “Rhine. The river that, somewhere out there, has broken free.”

— Lauren DeStefano