Top 500 Libba Bray Quotes (2024 Update)
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251. “We are the dead. We are the keepers of the stories. We hold the history of blood and promises. We are speaking. Are you listening? Will you hear?”

— Libba Bray

252. “I can see his pain, see it in the way he runs his fingers through his hair, over and over, and I understand what it costs him to hide it all.”

— Libba Bray

253. “What do you feel? I’ve never been asked this question once. None of us has. We aren’t supposed to feel. We’re British.”

— Libba Bray

254. “Tonight, she went into the woods, and I fear she shall live in the woods of my soul for the rest of my days.”

— Libba Bray

255. “Agent Jones held Sinjin’s face in his hands. “I’m going to make balloon animals. People need balloon animals.” “How right you are, strange delusional man,” Sinjin said.”

— Libba Bray

256. “Alma Rene LaVoy was the most alive person Ling Chan has ever met. The pretty chorus girl was the light in the sky over Chinatown during a New Years celebration.”

— Libba Bray

257. “Might. Is there any opiate more powerful than that word?”

— Libba Bray

258. “My misery is reaching epidemic proportions.”

— Libba Bray

259. “The ladies pass the timee with gossip and hearsay. This is what they have in place of freedom- gime and gossip. Their lives are small and careful. I do not wish to live this way. I should like to make my mark. To venture opinions that may not be polite or even correct but are mine nonetheless. If I am to be hanged for anything, I should like to feel that I go to the gallows on my own strength.”

— Libba Bray

260. “May I suggest that you all read? And often. Believe me, it’s nice to have something to talk about other than the weather and the Queen’s health. Your mind is not a cage. It’s a garden. And it requires cultivating.”

— Libba Bray

261. “A place to keep all your secrets.”

— Libba Bray

262. “You’ve influenced the world not because you wanted to hug it and cuddle it and call it sweet thing, but because one day you wanted to beat the crap out of somebody but you didn’t. You made a painting instead.”

— Libba Bray

263. “We are English, and I expect you to behave as such. No more crying.”

— Libba Bray

264. “The wolf was at the door. His shadow spilled into the room, taking it over.”

— Libba Bray

265. “Come awake, Tom. Fathers can willfully hurt their children. They can be addicts too weak to give up their vices, no matter the pain it causes. Mothers can turn you invisible with neglect. They can erase you with a denial, a refusal to see. Friends can deceive you. People lie. It is a cold, hard world. I do not blame Nell Hawkins for retreating from it into a madness of her own choosing.”

— Libba Bray

266. “Ain’t that the way of the world, now? Good luck turns bad. Bad luck turns good. Just a big rolling craps game played between this world and the next, and we the dice getting tossed around.”

— Libba Bray

267. “Just once I’d like to meet a fella who isn’t a phony. Somebody who doesn’t wanna buy me a fur so he can show me off to his boys.”

— Libba Bray

268. “They see her differently now, as somebody. And isn’t that what everyone wants? To be seen?”

— Libba Bray

269. “Jericho lay back down on his side, watching her breathe just an arm’s length from him. She was not beautiful while she slept; her mouth hung open and she snored very lightly, and this, despite everything that had happened, made him smile.”

— Libba Bray

270. “Long shadows of evening creep up the walls, inching closer. Gradually, they reach fully across us, holding us in the stillness that only night can bring. In the hazy gloom of dusk, we are silhouettes of ourselves, reduced to our very essence. The night grows bolder. Unafraid, it opens its mouth and swallows us whole.”

— Libba Bray

271. “Will was making a speech, something about having been young and careless once, the sort of thing old-timers said when they issued a deathblow, as if they thought their sanctimonious ramblings disguised as empathy would be welcomed, but Evie was only half listening.”

— Libba Bray

272. “It’s possible to pretend I’m someone other than who I am, and if I pretend long enough, I can believe it.”

— Libba Bray

273. “With a low bow, she is gone in a haze of roses and hope.”

— Libba Bray

274. “Everything is randomly connected.”

— Libba Bray

275. “My cholera’s acting up again.”

— Libba Bray

276. “That’s what he always did, tell a joke or find someone else when things began to feel like something genuine. Well, he was tired of feeling haunted – by Louis, by his father’s disappointment, and his mother’s illness. He’d let himself fill up with ghosts of shame until there was no room for love. No more. No more.”

— Libba Bray

277. “Maybe that’s what real friendship is – getting so used to people that you need to be annoyed by them.”

— Libba Bray

278. “Evie yanked him to safety by the edge of his shirt, ripping it. “Thanks. You owe me a shirt,” Sam said. “You owe me twenty dollars.”

— Libba Bray

279. “How can my ankles and arms be obscene?”

— Libba Bray

280. “All the times I say, ‘Don’t see me’? With you, I wish I had an opposite power: See me. See me, Evie. See all of me. There’s a fella who loves you right here. I’m not perfect. I’m a handful. But you know what? So are you. There. Not sugarcoating it.”

— Libba Bray

281. “Because I’m not enough, she thought. That was the terrible echo shouting up at her: Fraud, fraud, fraud. She got drunk and talked too much and danced on tables. She had a temper and a sharp tongue, and she often blurted out things she instantly regretted. Worst of all, she suspected that was who she truly was – not so much a bright young thing as a messy young thing.”

— Libba Bray

282. “Duff’s little moans traveled up her spine, made her head buzz. And another thought grabbed hold: She was doing this. She had the power to do this. THat she could be both completely vulnerable and totally in control was mind-blowing.”

— Libba Bray

283. “That’s what living in their world is-a big lie. An illusion where everyone looks the other way and pretends that nothing unpleasant exists at all, no goblins of the dark, no ghosts of the soul.”

— Libba Bray

284. “Sorry for all the pain and loneliness and disappointment. But there is this, too.”

— Libba Bray

285. “I think about dying every day, because I can’t stop thinking about living.”

— Libba Bray

286. “I am starting a collection of only right-hand gloves. It’s ever so bourgeois to have two.”

— Libba Bray

287. “They misspelled ‘party.’ How evil genius can they be?”

— Libba Bray

288. “I’ve learned that feminism is for everybody and there’s nothing wrong with taking up space in the world, even if you have to fight for it a little bit, and that if you don’t feel like smiling or waving, that’s okay. You don’t have to, and you don’t have to say sorry. Mostly, I’ve learned that I don’t really care if you like these answers or not, because they’re the best, most honest ones I’ve got, and I just don’t feel like I can cheat myself enough to give you what you want me to say.”

— Libba Bray

289. “What kind of person doesn’t let you have gummi bears?”

— Libba Bray

290. “We are nowhere, wanting to be somewhere, idling at the starting line of adulthood.”

— Libba Bray

291. “How do people stay in love, anyway? Is it a choice? Or is it like those plants we studied in biology that mutate into something new and totally different but are still part of the same plant family?”

— Libba Bray

292. “They wish, too, that they could warn them about the gray man in the stovepipe hat, about the King of Crows. For not all ghosts remember, and the citizens have need of warning.”

— Libba Bray

293. “I am a jumble of passions, misgivings, and wants. It seems that I am always in a state of wishing and rarely in a state of contentment.”

— Libba Bray

294. “It was funny how their odd little family of friends had changed him. Made him feel safe. Theta, Memphis, Henry, Jericho, Mabel, Ling, Isaiah, and especially Evie. They’d been there for him. Opened the parts of him he was afraid would be closed off forever. Why had he wasted so much time bottling up his feelings? What did that ever get anybody but dumb fights? He had friends. He had a home in them. And Evie was home, too.”

— Libba Bray

295. “You couldn’t be perfect enough to keep the world from betraying you.”

— Libba Bray

296. “But sons are a different matter to a man. More a duty than an indulgence.”

— Libba Bray

297. “It was a kiss small in its ministrations but epic in its feeling.”

— Libba Bray

298. “She wished she were as inconsequential as the ghosts in her dreams.”

— Libba Bray

299. “Discord need not be an impediment. Differences can bring strength.”

— Libba Bray

300. “There is no meaning but what we assign. We create our own reality. I can live with that.”

— Libba Bray