Top 120 Leah Raeder Quotes (2026 Update)
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51. “If two people could make each other smile and laugh and forget all the pain and darkness in the world for a moment, why should we feel ashamed of it?”

— Leah Raeder

52. “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

53. “The greater part of me knew it couldn’t be real, but the hopeful part, which is more concentrated and condensed, rich in nine essential delusions, thought: It’s not all in your head.”

— Leah Raeder

54. “I felt like an animal in a cage being stared at by other animals, all of us anonymous, mindless, interchangeable.”

— Leah Raeder

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

— Leah Raeder

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

— Leah Raeder

57. “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

58. “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

59. “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

60. “You fall in love with it a little. Depression. It’s an abusive romance. It hurts like hell but you don’t want it to stop, because at least hurt is a feeling. At least it reminds you you’re still alive.”

— Leah Raeder

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

— Leah Raeder

62. “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

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

— Leah Raeder

64. “Every dream is a pipe dream before someone achieves it.”

— Leah Raeder

65. “I thought of Blue somewhere out there in the lights twinkling across the harbor. Alone in a hotel room, watching the tiny people below. So far away from it, the warmth of skin and breath. From everything real.”

— Leah Raeder

66. “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

67. “There’s something so terrible about wanting something you’ve already had. You know exactly what you’re missing.”

— Leah Raeder

68. “Sometimes you feel things so much, so intensely, it becomes a new kind of numbness, the oblivion of overstimulation.”

— Leah Raeder

69. “I rarely bought anything. The things I really wanted couldn’t be bought.”

— Leah Raeder

70. “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

71. “To the only love that lasts,” she said when we raised our champagne glasses. “The love of family and friends.”

— Leah Raeder

72. “The thing about not breathing is no one tells you how addictive it is. That tingling rush, the buzz in every neuron as they eat through oxygen stores and reach for more and find nothing. It feels like a billion miniscule teeth digging into your brain. A shimmering wave of needle pricks starting in your lungs and skittering up your brain stem like a silvery centipede and spreading over your whole scalp, numbing you like a drug.”

— Leah Raeder

73. “I never wanted to be saved. I wanted someone to follow me down into the darkness.”

— Leah Raeder

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

— Leah Raeder

75. “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

76. “I never guessed it was that bad by looking at you,” she said. “You probably see a hundred disabled people every day and don’t realize.” “Never thought of that.” “Most people just want to pass quietly in society. No preconceptions, no prejudices.”

— Leah Raeder

77. “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

78. “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

79. “Listening to her banter with Armin was like standing between two ballet dancers in a gunfight. They circled each other elegantly, feinting, pirouetting, setting up the fatal shot, and Blythe was usually the one to fire it point-blank to Armin’s chest. He accepted his wounds with a gentleman’s grace, and the dance resumed.”

— Leah Raeder

80. “That’s why we’re just friends,” Armin said, so softly I barely heard. “She can’t fall in love, and I can’t fall out.”

— Leah Raeder

81. “Simplify what you see until it’s only bones, essence, soul. That’s the only way to understand what something really is.”

— Leah Raeder

82. “But that night we both lay awake, staring at the ceiling, silent. I thought, Who fixes broken people? Is it only other broken people, ones who’ve already been ruined? And do we need to be fixed? It was the messiness and hurt in our pasts that drove us, and that same hurt connected us at a subdermal level, the kind of scars written so deeply in your cells that you can’t even see them anymore, only recognize them in someone else.”

— Leah Raeder

83. “Sometimes boys grew up to be women. And girls grew up to be men.”

— Leah Raeder

84. “We don’t always get closure. Sometimes we have to make our own.”

— Leah Raeder

85. “You said you didn’t know how to have a grown-up relationship. Well, here’s your first lesson, Maise. When it gets hard, you don’t run away.”

— Leah Raeder

86. “That’s how you know someone loves you. When they want you to be happy even in the part of your life they’ll never see”.”

— Leah Raeder

87. “I kissed my teacher in the shadow of the water tower, beneath the stars.”

— Leah Raeder

88. “I don’t categorize people by who I’m allowed to like and who I’m allowed to love. Love doesn’t fit into boxes like that. It’s blurry, slippery, quantum. It’s only limited by our perceptions and before we slap a label on it and cram it into some category, everything is possible.”

— Leah Raeder

89. “I felt nothing. Do you know how much blood is soaked into every mile of asphalt, how many graves you drive over each morning on the way to work? This world is so thick with ghosts it’s a wonder anyone can breathe.”

— Leah Raeder

90. “Ellis and I had debated: Should we show the bad as well, or only the good? I said only the good. Why should Skylar’s suffering linger on? Why not let her rest, celebrate her life? But Ellis said showing the suffering was important because somewhere in that crowd tonight, someone else suffered, too. Someone would see those photos of her pain and feel a resonance. The point of art, of any communion between human beings, wasn’t to make people feel good – it was to make them feel less alone.”

— Leah Raeder

91. “This world is run by people who know somebody.”

— Leah Raeder

92. “This world is so thick with ghosts it’s a wonder anyone can breathe.”

— Leah Raeder

93. “Okay, two weaknesses. I’m still supervillain material.”

— Leah Raeder

94. “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

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

— Leah Raeder

96. “I don’t categorize people by who I’m allowed to like and who I’m allowed to love.”

— Leah Raeder

97. “What brings you back to life also gives you the means to destroy yourself.”

— Leah Raeder

98. “Sometimes I feel like a deperson.”

— Leah Raeder

99. “The highway at night looked like a movie flashing past us in fast forward, all the lights receding, out of reach. Autumn spread its golden disease through the woods, Midas trailing his fingers over the treetops. Dying things became extraordinarily beautiful at the very end.”

— Leah Raeder

100. “Most of us can’t even fix ourselves.”

— Leah Raeder