Top 120 Leah Raeder Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “Falling for someone is like pulling a loose thread. It happens stitch by stitch. You feel whole most of the time even while the seams pop, the knots loosen, everything that holds you together coming undone. It feels incredible, this opening of yourself to the world. Not like the unraveling it is. Only afterward do you glance down at the tangle of string around your feet that used to be a person who was whole and self-contained and realize that love is not a thing that we create. It’s an undoing.”

— Leah Raeder

52. “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

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

— Leah Raeder

54. “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

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

— Leah Raeder

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

— Leah Raeder

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

— Leah Raeder

58. “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

59. “Darkness isn’t bad. It’s only darkness.” Those fingers relaxed. “All it means is you don’t see the world as they do. You see what’s really there. They see what they wish was there.”

— Leah Raeder

60. “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

61. “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

62. “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

63. “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

64. “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

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

— Leah Raeder

66. “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

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

— Leah Raeder

68. “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

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

— Leah Raeder

70. “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

71. “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

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

— Leah Raeder

73. “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

74. “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

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

— Leah Raeder

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

— Leah Raeder

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

— Leah Raeder

78. “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

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

— Leah Raeder

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

— Leah Raeder

81. “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

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

— Leah Raeder

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

— Leah Raeder

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

— Leah Raeder

85. “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

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

— Leah Raeder

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

— Leah Raeder

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

— Leah Raeder

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

— Leah Raeder

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

— Leah Raeder

91. “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

92. “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

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

— Leah Raeder

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

— Leah Raeder

95. “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

96. “If I die, that’s what they’ll find in me. This face, inked in the surface of every cell.”

— Leah Raeder

97. “Suicide isn’t really about death, though. It’s about change. Release.”

— Leah Raeder

98. “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

99. “If you tell a story enough times, it sounds like fiction. You don’t feel that visceral throb of resonance with the person who is you, who did the things you did.”

— Leah Raeder

100. “I was so sure this was different, the kind of story they made movies and books about, but in the end it was just a summer to a summer, a dizzying breath of honeysuckle and whiskey and candle smoke, inhaled, held, let go.”

— Leah Raeder