Top 35 Riley Redgate Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “If you can’t fix it, leave it behind.”

— Riley Redgate

2. “I love every detail, because it means I’m close enough to know these tiny secrets. I.”

— Riley Redgate

3. “You don’t realize how alone you are until you let yourself out of your cage, or until someone finds a way inside.”

— Riley Redgate

4. “No, don’t argue. Just do it. Man, do I have to force you into everything? I swear, when you get married, I’m gonna be standing at the altar pinching you between every vow.”

— Riley Redgate

5. “Life is better when it’s scripted.”

— Riley Redgate

6. “It was a weird day if figuring out you were bisexual made up the least of your mental turmoil.”

— Riley Redgate

7. “You know what they say. Three things last forever: faith, hope and spite. And the greatest of these is spite.”

— Riley Redgate

8. “Though I guess if you love someone, the thought of losing their approval is probably twice as terrifying.”

— Riley Redgate

9. “Here, I choose to love what I have. Here, I choose to love what I am now.”

— Riley Redgate

10. “I promise you, two dozen words were not the difference between mediocrity and excellence. Make a habit of burning something to ash before expecting a rebirth.”

— Riley Redgate

11. “Maybe he knew the whole time that trying to hold on to her was like trying to hold on to ice – a wasted effort that was only going to leave him cold.”

— Riley Redgate

12. “Hearts fit together like hands. Not by necessity. By choice.”

— Riley Redgate

13. “I wish I could tell who was gentle all the way down, and who turned to sharp edges the deeper you got.”

— Riley Redgate

14. “I stand there looking after him with the feeling that – just like that, in one careless moment – I might’ve ruined somebody’s life.”

— Riley Redgate

15. “It was impossible to feel alone in a room full of favorite books. I had the sense that they knew me personally, that they’d read me cover to cover as I’d read them.”

— Riley Redgate

16. “Let’s short circuit in the rain. I loved you then, too.”

— Riley Redgate

17. “Sometimes, good intentions couldn’t do a thing except make you feel less alone, and sometimes that was enough.”

— Riley Redgate

18. “There was something alienating about being on scholarship, a tense mixture of gratefulness and otherness. You’re talented, the money said, and we want you here. Still, it had the twang of You were, are, and always will be different.”

— Riley Redgate

19. “Interrogate your instincts. Insecurity isn’t shameful. Attraction isn’t an embarrassment. Interpersonal affection isn’t a side note to be glossed over. Whatever the nature of the material that forms between two people, it’s the backbone of literature.”

— Riley Redgate

20. “We are always moving forward – I can see it now. We are hurtling through our lives. We are never standing still.”

— Riley Redgate

21. “It’s sort of hilarious, though, how so many... kids like to think they’re social outcasts, talking with people who are obviously their friends about ‘never fitting in’. They have no idea. If they did, they wouldn’t glamorize it. The reality of isolation is glamorous and unexciting” -Kat.”

— Riley Redgate

22. “Hannah gave a feral smile and let her dark eyes bore into Laila’s. This was one of several reasons people were terrified of her: the Hannah Park stare. If it weren’t enough that Hannah was beautiful, in the same way an ice storm or a forest fire was beautiful, she also had the habit of making more unbroken, intense eye contact than was comfortable for anybody.”

— Riley Redgate

23. “The story pours over me like water, drips down onto my head until I’m immersed head-to-toe, transported between the covers.”

— Riley Redgate

24. “The only real thing was her phone, alive and moving in her pocket, where her friends’ reassurances built up. Every so often she looked down at it, the corner of a glowing screen peeking out of her pocket, and felt herself slipping inside that digital place they had together, where the world was made out of words and everything was safe.”

— Riley Redgate

25. “Sometimes you want people to – not even put you first, or anything, but to just think about you a little, you know?”

— Riley Redgate

26. “Or maybe love is never healthy, and we should guard our hearts in hospitals for preemptive healing.”

— Riley Redgate

27. “Panic is pouring around me, liquid in a glass box, drowning me inch by inch. What.”

— Riley Redgate

28. “It wasn’t enlightenment to live like you had no history and no consequences. The world wasn’t just made out of instants – it was made out of plans, too, and the ability to learn from your mistakes.”

— Riley Redgate

29. “I meant to ask Erik to say something to Victoria, to follow what had happened at the dance, but I couldn’t settle on the right words. An apology for fleeing, sure, but then what? ‘I only think of you as a friend’? ‘I think we should see other people’? ‘It’s not you, it’s the fact that I’m secretly a girl who sacrificed a foot and a half of perfectly good hair to the dark gods of a capella’?”

— Riley Redgate

30. “Beauty was beauty and want was want and a beating heart was a beating heart.”

— Riley Redgate

31. “It’s too simple to hate the people who have doorways where you have walls.”

— Riley Redgate

32. “Maybe Nazarenko’s guidance would puncture her, but something would grow back over the injury, not scar tissue but armor, gleaming and valuable.”

— Riley Redgate

33. “I’ve always thought everybody’s a genius at something; you just have to dig it up and polish the hell out of it.”

— Riley Redgate

34. “The desire for privacy and intimacy war inside of me, these contradictory hopes for secrecy and connection. I don’t want him to know, but I want him to understand. I want to hide. I want to be seen.”

— Riley Redgate

35. “I don’t want to read your walls... I don’t want to read your hang-ups. I don’t want to read skeletal concepts of people who operate without the influence of a limbic system. You are not an archaeologist excavating and presenting old bones. Your work is the connective tissue. Give me some DNA, or don’t bother.”

— Riley Redgate

36. “She guessed she was pansexual, a word acquired from the internet, from people who seemed more confident in it than she was: Yes, she still couldn’t say, I could want anyone, any gender, any type. Any person in the universe. Past layer and layer of self-consciousness, she knew it was true. But admitting the want was excruciating. The idea that somebody could look at her and just see it made her want to cry.”

— Riley Redgate

37. “Kiss a girl once and suddenly the world seems built to support her existence.”

— Riley Redgate

38. “It’s like okay, guys, we get it, life is futile, existing is a tragedy. Smile for once, oh my God.”

— Riley Redgate

39. “Out there, danger wasn’t something that erupted purposelessly in parking lots or at traffic intersections; it was peril, pure and moral and invigorating. Unifying. Out there, love bridged the space between planets, and betrayal risked the destruction of universes. Life was lived along a spectrum so vibrant it felt ultraviolet. How could the world outside the window seem anything but gray in comparison?”

— Riley Redgate