Top 120 Leah Raeder Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “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

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. “Nobody knows how to be a grown-up. We’re all just pretending for each other.”

— Leah Raeder

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

— Leah Raeder

55. “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

56. “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

57. “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

58. “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

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

— Leah Raeder

60. “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

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

— Leah Raeder

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

— Leah Raeder

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

— Leah Raeder

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

— Leah Raeder

65. “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

66. “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

67. “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

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

— Leah Raeder

69. “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

70. “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

71. “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

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

— Leah Raeder

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

— Leah Raeder

74. “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

75. “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

76. “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

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

— Leah Raeder

78. “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

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

— Leah Raeder

80. “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

81. “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

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

— Leah Raeder

83. “Angels trying to scar themselves, bored of perfection.”

— Leah Raeder

84. “He can talk about the future all he wants, but it’s not going to wait for him to start.”

— Leah Raeder

85. “A body has a way of wanting to be touched so badly that the touch itself will hurt, but so will remaining untouched. Nothing helps.”

— Leah Raeder

86. “Just like in fairy tales, the wish wasn’t worth the price.”

— Leah Raeder

87. “Don’t be afraid,” Evan said. “We’re in this together, hand in hand, against the world.”

— Leah Raeder

88. “It wasn’t about flirting with death, like Mom. It was about wanting to live all the way to the seams of life.”

— Leah Raeder

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

— Leah Raeder

90. “Hate is when you love someone but wish you didn’t.”

— Leah Raeder

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

— Leah Raeder

92. “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

93. “The whole summer was inside of us.”

— Leah Raeder

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

— Leah Raeder

95. “This is the suburbs: they tear down nature, then you have to go to Home Depot to buy it back.”

— Leah Raeder

96. “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

97. “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

98. “This is what happens when you lie. Lies grow thin and steely and hard and become bars. Bars become a cage.”

— Leah Raeder

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

— Leah Raeder

100. “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