Top 120 Leah Raeder Quotes (2024 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. “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

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

— Leah Raeder

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

— Leah Raeder

7. “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

8. “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

9. “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

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

— Leah Raeder

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

— Leah Raeder

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

— Leah Raeder

13. “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

14. “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

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

— Leah Raeder

16. “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

17. “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

18. “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

19. “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

20. “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

21. “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

22. “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

23. “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

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

— Leah Raeder

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

— Leah Raeder

26. “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

27. “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

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

— Leah Raeder

29. “Nobody knows how to be a grown-up. We’re all just pretending for each other. It takes some people their entire lives to figure out what you already know.”

— Leah Raeder

30. “This was an old-time, black-and-white-movie kiss, with the orchestra swelling in my chest, hot tungsten lamps carving out our shadows. My bones turned to air, nothing holding me up but the fierceness of my desire.”

— Leah Raeder

31. “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

32. “But when I was alone I couldn’t breathe. Everything feels like drowning except you. You’re my oxygen.”

— Leah Raeder

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

— Leah Raeder

34. “The world looks down on you, expects nothing from you because of the color of your skin and your mother’s family name. They don’t want you to fail. They want you to not even try. If you try, you will never disappoint me.”

— Leah Raeder

35. “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

36. “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

37. “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

38. “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

39. “He looked at all of me, my fresh teenage skin, my adult certainty, my old soul. No one had ever looked at me so completely. No one had ever seen me as such a whole, rounded person.”

— Leah Raeder

40. “I stood in the rain, watching his car go. A string tied to it looped around my heart and pulled tighter and tighter until it sheared clean through.”

— Leah Raeder

41. “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

42. “In retrospect, you know all the answers. You know the shadowy throes of your heart.”

— Leah Raeder

43. “The city at night gave me the same melancholy twinge I’d felt as a kid watching Mom plug in the Christmas tree. Something beautiful and full of promise, but something you knew you could never touch.”

— Leah Raeder

44. “This life will be a cage for you.”

— Leah Raeder

45. “Some days I didn’t eat. I confused the gnawing in my belly for hunger and fed it, but it only made me sick. Strange how much missing someone feels like hunger. How the hole they leave behind is so much larger than they were. How it grows even bigger, feeding on you.”

— Leah Raeder

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

— Leah Raeder

47. “Anger is like that. Runs on its own fumes, devours itself voraciously, explosively, until one day there is no fire left. Only pure, cold, unbreakable hardness. Like the diamond core in me.”

— Leah Raeder

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

— Leah Raeder

49. “But every stroke of the brush, every lyric, every word whispered between human beings resulted from the pain of being alone. In our haunted heads, our imperfect bodies. Islands carved from clay and bone, our skulls like shells full of mist.”

— Leah Raeder

50. “I thought of Blue. “Sometimes it’s easier to talk to a stranger.”

— Leah Raeder