Top 40 Micah Nemerever Quotes (2026 Update)

1. “All they were – all they had ever been – was a pair of sunflowers who each believed the other was the sun.”

— Micah Nemerever

2. “He couldn’t stand to look at the truth, even now. All they were – all they had ever been – was a pair of sunflowers who each believed the other was the sun.”

— Micah Nemerever

3. “It was a relief and a horror to be known so perfectly.”

— Micah Nemerever

4. “They wanted each other in the way of flesh wanting to knit itself together over a wound.”

— Micah Nemerever

5. “If you paint a masterpiece and then set it on fire, it still would have mattered. If you know you’ve made something beautiful, who cares how long it lasts.”

— Micah Nemerever

6. “He decided to learn to be impulsive, which meant planning the impulse so exhaustively that he could almost ignore his misgivings.”

— Micah Nemerever

7. “The opening move was circled in red.”

— Micah Nemerever

8. “I always think of a passage from the Symposium, this allegory about people who started off as two halves of a whole, but then something cut them apart, and they spend their whole lives looking for their other half so they can fit themselves back together. And that’s how it feels, it hurts, it’s like I lost you before I was born.”

— Micah Nemerever

9. “He wanted to forget he’d ever yielded to the weakness of wanting anything. He wanted to scrub away any evidence that he existed outside his own head at all – that he was a visible object that anyone else could see and mock and judge.”

— Micah Nemerever

10. “He remembered the way love had burned through him like a flame under glass, grasping outward, devouring what air it had left before it choked.”

— Micah Nemerever

11. “I don’t think you’ve ever felt anything that didn’t hurt you,” Julian said. “We’ve found each other, out of everyone else in the world. Does that hurt, too?”

— Micah Nemerever

12. “His face was so blank that Paul could read anything he wanted in his features. He chose disgust.”

— Micah Nemerever

13. “And then they act like you’re crazy when do you speak up, just to drive the point home that being shy is safer?”

— Micah Nemerever

14. “It always makes me a little sad when you laugh,” Julian went on. “The way it sort of takes you by surprise. I love it, it has that sweet sincerity that’s the best part of you, but it still kills me how you never seem to expect it. All I want to do is make you happy, and you’re the unhappiest person I’ve ever met.”

— Micah Nemerever

15. “Paul observed Julian’s compassion with more unease than fondness. The kindness was sincere, but so was the fascination. Julian could witness suffering and endure it, so long as it was under enough control that he could tease apart how it worked. Once he knew the shape of someone else’s pain, he could break off a piece of it- claim it as his own, keep it as a memento under glass -and know they would be grateful to him for taking it away.”

— Micah Nemerever

16. “I kill them because they’re beautiful, and it’s the only way I can keep them.”

— Micah Nemerever

17. “Since his death his father’s absence had spilled far past the carefully drawn outlines his father had occupied when he was alive. It had flowed into every available space and settled there, and there was no chance Julian hadn’t noticed it.”

— Micah Nemerever

18. “Side by side they are twin angels on a headstone, cold and terrible and immutable. They were boys once, he remembers, but they aren’t anymore.”

— Micah Nemerever

19. “Their fathers make their fortunes pouring poison into the sky. What’s a little one-on-one torture when you know the world is yours to ruin?”

— Micah Nemerever

20. “I love you.” Julian spoke without looking at him. He was watching the ceiling fan slice uselessly through the thick air. “I really do. I wish you could tell.”

— Micah Nemerever

21. “When she met Paul’s eyes, it was as if she were seeing him for the first time. He couldn’t remember why he’d ever wanted to be seen.”

— Micah Nemerever

22. “Of course they would promise each other everything. Of course eternity would yield to them once they’d earned it.”

— Micah Nemerever

23. “Paul watched Strauss’s wife as he spoke, only half-listening. They looked like siblings, in the way married couples often did; Paul wondered if men and women did that on purpose, choosing mates who were otherwise much like them in order to mitigate the other gender’s unfamiliarity.”

— Micah Nemerever

24. “He had all but pleaded for it, the precision and scalpel-sharp intimacy of Julian’s cruelty. He had needed to remember that they were monstrous together, merciless, twins conjoined at the teeth.”

— Micah Nemerever

25. “They could only stitch themselves back together if they did something irreversible.”

— Micah Nemerever

26. “Stillness and vulnerability were so foreign to Julian’s body that sleep looked unnatural on him.”

— Micah Nemerever

27. “In hindsight his frustrations and fears would be taken as evidence that he was still human – but in the present, before he’d made anything of himself, they meant he was only human.”

— Micah Nemerever

28. “Of course he made every promise Julian asked of him, because they’d hurt each other enough, and it was the only mercy he could offer.”

— Micah Nemerever

29. “Paul wasn’t sure he would ever grow used to it – this precipitous thrill of being seen and known and understood.”

— Micah Nemerever

30. “He usually hurried to console Paul if he wept, no matter how trivial or foolish the injury. It was only now that he withheld the comfort that Paul understood the full power Julian held over him.”

— Micah Nemerever

31. “Do you want me to kill them?”

— Micah Nemerever

32. “He endured it to punish himself, and to prove to himself that he could; those were the only two reasons he ever chose to do anything worthwhile.”

— Micah Nemerever

33. “Grief was normal enough that it felt almost safe, and Paul could imagine enduring it forever. He might be able to suspend the two of them together in amber, so long as his unhappiness remained the same.”

— Micah Nemerever

34. “Don’t be so eager to get your feelings hurt, it’s boring and beneath you.”

— Micah Nemerever

35. “He wanted to tear through Julian’s skin and map the shapes of liver and lungs, to memorize the path of every artery with his fingertips. He wanted to break Julian’s body open and move inside it alongside him, rib cages interlaced around a single heart.”

— Micah Nemerever

36. “You figure out on your own what’s good and what isn’t, and maybe that idea ends up being rigid, but that’s better than not having anything at all.”

— Micah Nemerever

37. “You are just as I always knew you would be,” she said. “Curly hair, sad eyes. Quite striking, in your way. His sweethearts always are.”

— Micah Nemerever

38. “Beautiful things are supposed to hurt. It’s what I was saying earlier – even if you don’t know how you’re going to create something that matters, you can still want to do it so badly you can barely think about anything else –.”

— Micah Nemerever

39. “All he could think about was throwing himself against a wall, over and over, until he’d smashed himself into shards so fine that the void inside him could finally slip free.”

— Micah Nemerever

40. “You’re fine. Not that you need to care. Think for a second about what ‘normal’ means.”

— Micah Nemerever

41. “I need to make something beautiful, something that lasts. I don’t know what, but I have to, if I want my life to matter at all.”

— Micah Nemerever