Top 120 Leah Raeder Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “The only way to cure an obsession is to become obsessed with something else.”

— Leah Raeder

2. “There are moments, when you’re getting to know someone, when you realize something deep and buried in you is deep and buried in them, too. It feels like meeting a stranger you’ve known your whole life.”

— Leah Raeder

3. “That is all life is. Breathing in, breathing out. The space between two breaths.”

— Leah Raeder

4. “I hide myself in my words. There’s a cipher, and one half is in my writing and the other half is in me, and if you have them both then you’ll understand everything. Strangers think it’s just a story, but you’ll know what’s real. You’ll know who I really am.”

— Leah Raeder

5. “You should love something while you have it, love it fully and without reservation, even if you know you’ll lose it someday.”

— Leah Raeder

6. “I can’t hold on to you. You’re like a shooting star. Just a trail of fire in my hands.”

— Leah Raeder

7. “Why did everything beautiful come from pain?”

— Leah Raeder

8. “I dream of you in colors that don’t exist.”

— Leah Raeder

9. “Part of falling in love with someone is actually falling in love with yourself. Realizing that you’re gorgeous, you’re fearless and unpredictable, you’re a firecracker spitting light, entrancing a hundred faces that stare up at you with starry eyes.”

— Leah Raeder

10. “There’s something so terrible about wanting something you’ve already had. You know exactly what you’re missing. Your body knows precisely how to shape itself around the ache, the hollowness that wants to be filled.”

— Leah Raeder

11. “I see the lights every night. It seems like the whole world has figured out how to be happy, but no one’s letting me in on the secret.”

— Leah Raeder

12. “You can call it love, or you can call it freefall. They’re pretty much the same thing.”

— Leah Raeder

13. “People know their feelings much sooner than they consciously accept them.”

— Leah Raeder

14. “Strength is not in the body, it’s in the mind. It doesn’t lie in flexing your muscles and crushing those who oppose you. It lies in being the last one standing. By any means. At any cost.”

— Leah Raeder

15. “The simplest way to not get caught doing a bad thing is to do it in front of everyone. Because most people are good – or scared, which is the same thing, functionally – and good people associate badness with guilt. Skulking, hiding. Lurking in the dark. They assume you feel their shame, that you’ll try to hide your sins. They try to catch you in the shadows. No one looks for badness in the light.”

— Leah Raeder

16. “I slapped a big fake smile on my face like I did every day, as a cam girl, as a barista, as anything, because women are taught to smile, that smiling means men are less likely to hurt us.”

— Leah Raeder

17. “You must really hate me, huh?” she said. “No.” I took a deep breath, wiped my face with my hand. “If I thought you could change, I’d hate you for not trying.” I looked her dead in the eye. “But this is who you are. You’re a liar, and a thief, and a junkie. I don’t hate you, Mom. I’m disappointed in you.”

— Leah Raeder

18. “You know, rust is just oxidation. The same chemical process as fire. Oxygen interacts with steel, electrons drift from one element to the other. So really, rust is a slow fire. Isn’t that weird? Water causes something to burn.”

— Leah Raeder

19. “Lesson number one: defensiveness is defeat. Never defend yourself.”

— Leah Raeder

20. “It’s inevitable that three drunk friends with unresolved sexual tension will play truth or dare.”

— Leah Raeder

21. “Kintsugi is a pottery technique. When something breaks, like a vase, they glue it back together with melted gold. Instead of making the cracks invisible, they make them beautiful. To celebrate the history of the object. What it’s been through. And I was just... Thinking of us like that. My heart full of gold veins, instead of cracks.”

— Leah Raeder

22. “I miss seeing the world with you. I miss your body, I miss your voice and your laugh and your smile and the way you make me feel like a child, in the best way. Afraid and full of wonder and totally alive. This is me telling you, without reservation, that I love you.”

— Leah Raeder

23. “Sometimes people set themselves up to be hurt by a situation, instead of hurting themselves directly. To absolve the blame.”

— Leah Raeder

24. “Seeing someone you once loved is like falling in love for the first time all over again.”

— Leah Raeder

25. “You can fall in love again with someone you’re already in love with. It’s like waking from a dream within a dream and finding another layer, the colors more vivid, the light more lucid, the fantasy more real. Being in love is an endless loop of waking to reverie.”

— Leah Raeder

26. “My love is savage and rapacious. It isn’t content to touch. It wants to be inside, crawl into the marrow, caress each vein until the cells are all mixed up and there is no you and me anymore, no secrets or shadows sliding between our skin. Only this endless devouring of each other. The ouroboros we call us.”

— Leah Raeder

27. “Don’t lead people on. It’s cruel.”

— Leah Raeder

28. “Not a boy or a girl, not any binary, rigid definition of a person. Just my everything.”

— Leah Raeder

29. “Let the sheep bleat. Their own noises soothe them.”

— Leah Raeder

30. “Girls get under each other’s skin. We get too close, too attached, too crazy, and then we can’t let go. Our claws sink too deep. When we separate, we tear each other apart.”

— Leah Raeder

31. “It’s like a dream and a nightmare both come true. Every night I’ve prayed for this, and when it happens the first thing I feel is resentment. Anger, honestly. There’s something wrong with me.” “It’s not wrong. You can miss someone without missing the way they hurt you.”

— Leah Raeder

32. “Maybe we needed to break a little, so we could put ourselves back together more beautifully than before.”

— Leah Raeder

33. “If there’s a better definition of love than mutual benevolent insanity, I haven’t heard it.”

— Leah Raeder

34. “Mom used to say that if you listen, people will tell you exactly how to hurt them. Because part of us wants to be hurt. We want to know how strong we really are.”

— Leah Raeder

35. “It’s crazy, that the defining moment of your life can be nothing to someone else. Like an infatuation, an unrequited love, every bit of you is drawn to it, orbits that heaviness at the center of your universe, everything you think and feel revolving around it and yet, nobody knows. Even the one who caused it. Especially the one who caused it.”

— Leah Raeder

36. “I couldn’t tear my eyes from the window, wanting to drink in as much of St. Louis as I could, knowing somewhere out there, one of those infinitesimally small lights was him. I wondered if he’d look up and see the planes crossing the sky like shooting stars, knowing one of those lights was me.”

— Leah Raeder

37. “We all see blue, but some of us see blue as an inflection, a mood, of black or red, while others see blue as its own creature.”

— Leah Raeder

38. “Was that what I’d have to do? Pry my ribs open and see whose hands fit, whose fingers were stained with the same red inside me?”

— Leah Raeder

39. “Part of loving someone is wanting them to be happy, even if it hurts you.”

— Leah Raeder

40. “I never wanted you until I had you.” She looked at me now, her breath ruffling my hair. “And then I couldn’t imagine my life without you anymore. You’re the dark thing that was in me. I set you free.”

— Leah Raeder

41. “Most of the time romance isn’t even about love, anyway. It’s about escape. Fantasy. Salvation from the mundane. Save me from boredom, from exhaustion, from my undersexed body, from microwave dinners and reality TV, from going to bed alone with a vibrator or a cat. Save me from my desperately ordinary life.”

— Leah Raeder

42. “Where was the lens between me and the world? Was it my eyes, my skin, my mind? Where did reality stop and my perception of it begin?”

— Leah Raeder

43. “You’ve done something to me.” My voice was quiet, too, a ribbon of breath threading into the breeze that stirred my hair. “I feel like I’m waking from a long dream, and everything is so much more beautiful than I remembered.”

— Leah Raeder

44. “Call me more things. Call me yours.”

— Leah Raeder

45. “Recklessness makes you act. Bravery is following through.”

— Leah Raeder

46. “It blurred the lines between lust and inspiration in a way we’ve always intuitively known they should be blurred, because desire underlies every act of creation.”

— Leah Raeder

47. “Missing someone is the whetstone that sharpens want.”

— Leah Raeder

48. “You should love something while you have it, love it fully and without reservation, even if you know you’ll lose it someday. We lose everything. If you’re trying to avoid loss, there’s no point in taking another breath, or letting your heart beat one more time. It all ends.”

— Leah Raeder

49. “I caught all these little moments while I was pretending to live them. I did live them, but I’m not sure where I was when they happened, if I was the lens watching or the skin being touched. That’s the whole point. We don’t know anymore.”

— Leah Raeder

50. “We looked at each other with that resentment you feel when you want something so much it’s causing you pain, so much you start to hate it a little.”

— Leah Raeder