Top 60 Nova Ren Suma Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Sometimes a perfect memory can be ruined if put to words.”

— Nova Ren Suma

2. “In reality I was a pencil drawing of a photocopy of a Polaroid of my sister- you could see the resemblance in a certain light if you were seeking it out because I told you first if you were being nice.”

— Nova Ren Suma

3. “My Heart and Other Black Holes is alive with intensity, gut-wrenching honesty, moments of humor, and – of course – heart. This is an extraordinary debut by a striking new voice in YA fiction that left me in awe and moved beyond measure. Not to be missed.”

— Nova Ren Suma

4. “The last time I saw my mother, she’d turned her back on me like I was the bullet.”

— Nova Ren Suma

5. “There’s something ugly about a pretty boy who knows he’s pretty and assumes everyone else know it too.”

— Nova Ren Suma

6. “Something I would always remember. When you forget how bad it hurts, you feel so free.”

— Nova Ren Suma

7. “We were alive. I remember it that way. We were still alive, and we couldn’t see how close we were to the end.”

— Nova Ren Suma

8. “She was guilty; the juvenile justice system said so. So that had to mean she belonged.”

— Nova Ren Suma

9. “Home is where the heart is, and where the hell is, and where the hate is, and where the hopelessness is. Which made Aurora Hills pretty much like home.”

— Nova Ren Suma

10. “This is called closure, and it’s also called justice, and they are not always the same thing.”

— Nova Ren Suma

11. “Sometimes it could be the smallest thing that could topple over a whole life, and, in the end, destroy it.”

— Nova Ren Suma

12. “I was looking back into memories I didn’t own, wanting in.”

— Nova Ren Suma

13. “She smelled of deep, dark things and untold secrets and all of what she was keeping from me.”

— Nova Ren Suma

14. “The hole gets bigger, and I’m not sorry.”

— Nova Ren Suma

15. “We were gasoline rushing for a lit match. We bared our teeth. Balled fists.”

— Nova Ren Suma

16. “When writing fiction, memories still filter in, and these memories twist and distort and transform until they become living, breathing pieces of the story, as they have here.”

— Nova Ren Suma

17. “Our private tastes in books showed a hint of our secret selves.”

— Nova Ren Suma

18. “But no, it’s not the Ori I knew. It’s an Ori I never knew. The Ori I made her into.”

— Nova Ren Suma

19. “Ori made it wanted. She acted like it was lucky. And forever after, it was.”

— Nova Ren Suma

20. “But no one fought for Orianna Catherine Speerling.”

— Nova Ren Suma

21. “Probably she died. Consumption. Fever. Mountain lion. I don’t know.”

— Nova Ren Suma

22. “There are no mourners here. No tourists. No rubberneckers. No one to sideswipe Tommy’s car.”

— Nova Ren Suma

23. “Everything I know about bombs tells me they are built to explode. But something must set them off first. There must be a trigger before the noise goes off, before the big burst of bright, choking smoke. Otherwise a girl could stay quiet for years.”

— Nova Ren Suma

24. “We understand how that can make a girl crumble.”

— Nova Ren Suma

25. “Here was the moment to drop some wisdom from my three years, one month, and fifteen days of being incarcerated at Aurora Hills, but I kept it back.”

— Nova Ren Suma

26. “There was something to be said for the bodiless feeling that came after the cold. Something I would always remember. When you forget how bad it hurts, you feel so free.”

— Nova Ren Suma

27. “Maybe, long ago, we used to be good. Maybe all little girls are good in the beginning.”

— Nova Ren Suma

28. “She’d gone quiet now. She wasn’t telling. She was learning to keep her one true secret, and she’d learned that from me.”

— Nova Ren Suma

29. “The story you choose to tell isn’t always the story you believe.”

— Nova Ren Suma

30. “I wonder who drove all the way up here to leave this piece of hate mail for the dead.”

— Nova Ren Suma

31. “None of our parents saw what we could see, which had us decide that growing up into adulthood must mean going blind.”

— Nova Ren Suma

32. “We have some ideas about the afterlife, about why we’re still here. The thing about a life being cut short, when it’s not by choice and not with any rhyme or reason or hinted at by diagnosis or threat, is that sometimes, some of you will want to hang on. We do. We can’t seem to find a way to leave.”

— Nova Ren Suma

33. “The other two weren’t even dancers. They were football players. Which was ridiculous.”

— Nova Ren Suma

34. “They decide as soon as they meet you. Ten seconds in. If you’re poor. If you’re brown. If you’re black. If you’ve got an accent. If your skirt’s too short. If your nose is ugly – sorry, Cherie. If you’re chewing gum. If you’re breathing funny. If nobody from your family is there. If you’re any of that? Or all of that? Have a nice life, because you’re out of there.”

— Nova Ren Suma

35. “I stared down the wall, which did not stare back at me. I wouldn’t let her rattle me. The cart barely had any books on it, and the ones there were just tossed on, upside down, disorganized. It hurt to look.”

— Nova Ren Suma

36. “He doesn’t ask Sarabeth, he doesn’t ask Tommy. The person he’s asking is me.”

— Nova Ren Suma

37. “Teenage girls know more than we’re given credit for.”

— Nova Ren Suma

38. “But then the stage showed other things. Bad things. Murderous things. Things I would never really do. And things I would forget about in the morning, because I’d wake up feeling a whole lot better. I knew right from wrong, Ori and I both did. We were not terrible people. We were not fools.”

— Nova Ren Suma

39. “Most people, in the end, really are all on their own.”

— Nova Ren Suma

40. “It wasn’t locked at all, was it? All I had to do was push.”

— Nova Ren Suma

41. “I knew that just because people on the outside were free and clean, it didn’t mean they were the good ones.”

— Nova Ren Suma

42. “Life. We’d long known it was cruel.”

— Nova Ren Suma

43. “Some of us had been running all our lives. We ran because we could and because we could not. We ran for our lives. We still thought they were worth running for.”

— Nova Ren Suma

44. “Girls go missing every day. They slip out bedroom windows and into strange cars.”

— Nova Ren Suma

45. “She was pleased with Cherie’s contribution, which was a tree with the head of a man and the feet of a bird, possibly a chicken, and spiked eyelashes made of razor blades.”

— Nova Ren Suma

46. “To fit in somewhere in the world, even if there were chains and gates and fences to keep us from running.”

— Nova Ren Suma

47. “I wondered how they could know so much about my brain without lifting open my skull and poking through it.”

— Nova Ren Suma

48. “It was hoped we might have two lives – the way cats are said to have nine. This life we ruined, and another, for after.”

— Nova Ren Suma

49. “The point is, every book we had could save us in a different way – only, we had to open it. We had to drop our eyes to the page and drink in the words that were there.”

— Nova Ren Suma

50. “Our private taste in books showed a hint of our secret selves, and sometimes I was the only one who got to see those secrets.”

— Nova Ren Suma