Verity

“I think the idea of me is better than the reality of me.”

“No one is likable from the inside out.”

“Find what you love and let it kill you.”

“I wasn’t heroic. I wasn’t simple. I was difficult. An emotionally challenging puzzle he wasn’t up for solving.”

“What you read will taste so bad at times, you’ll want to spit it out, but you’ll swallow these words and they will become part of you, part of your gut, and you will hurt because of them.”

“It’s what you do when you’ve experienced the worst of the worst. You seek out people like you…people worse off than you…and you use them to make yourself feel better about the terrible things that have happened to you.”

“A writer should never have the audacity to write about themselves unless they’re willing to separate every layer of protection between the author’s soul and their book. The words should come directly from the center of the gut, tearing through flesh and bone as they break free. Ugly and honest and bloody and a little bit terrifying, but completely exposed.”

“The world was her manuscript. No surface was safe.”

“the things lurking around inside the mind can be just as dangerous as tangible threats.”

“Most people come to New York to be discovered. The rest of us come here to hide.”

“I stretch truths where I see fit. I’m a writer.”

“I was difficult. An emotionally challenging puzzle he wasn’t up for solving.Which was fine. I wasn’t in the mood to be solved”

“The good thing about sins is they don’t have to be atoned for immediately,”

“I was good at spewing bullshit. It's why I became a writer.”

“It’s natural, to assume the worst in people, even if that assumption is only for a split second”

“Some families are lucky enough to never experience a single tragedy. But then there are those families that seem to have tragedies waiting on the back burner. What can go wrong, goes wrong. And then gets worse.”

“I needed for the imaginary version of my world to be darker than my real world. Otherwise, I would have wanted to leave them both.”

“The kiss was full of both desire and respect—two things a lot of men didn’t seem to know could go hand in hand.”

“One should only walk away from an autobiography with, at best, an uncomfortable distaste for its author.”

“Take care of your physical being. Feed it what it needs, not what the conscience tells you it wants. Giving in to cravings of the mind that ultimately hurt the body is like a weak parent giving in to her child. “Oh, you had a bad day? Do you want an entire box of cookies? Okay, sweetie. Eat it. And drink this soda while you’re at it.” Caring for your body is no different from caring for a child. Sometimes it’s hard, sometimes it sucks, sometimes you just want to give in, but if you do, you’ll pay for the consequences eighteen years down the road.”

“My mother used to say that houses have a soul, and if that is true, the soul of Verity Crawford’s house is as dark as they come.”

“Your writing matters to me, Lowen.”

“If we were friends, I would do something to comfort him. Maybe grab his hand and hold it. But there’s too much inside me that wants to be more than his friend, which means we can’t be friends at all. If an attraction is present between two people, those two people can only be one of two things. Involved or not involved. There is no in-between.”

“I don’t want to call him an asshole. He’s a little kid, and he’s been through a lot. But I think he might be an asshole.”

“And that’s how easy it is for a writer to pretend to be someone they aren’t.”

“It was amazing how different sex felt when a person used more than their body. I involved my heart and my gut and my mind and my hope. I fell in that moment. Not in love. I just…fell.”

“Here, I’m invisible. Unimportant. Manhattan is too crowded to give a shit about me, and I love her for it.”

“And that’s why I stay at home and write. I think the idea of me is better than the reality of me.”

“If this bitch turned off that goddamn television, I’m walking out that front door without shoes on and I’m never coming back.”

“I’m the awkward writer who posts a picture of my book and says, “It’s an okay book. There are words in it. Read it if you want.”