A Semi-Definitive List of Worst Nightmares Quotes

“Everyone we let into our lives has the power to hurt us. Sometimes they will, and sometimes they won't, but that's not a reflection of us, or our strength. Loving someone who hurts you doesn't make you weak.”
― Krystal Sutherland, A Semi-Definitive List of Worst Nightmares

“Anxiety felt like a grapnel anchor had been pickaxed into your back, one prong in each lung, one through the heart, one through the spine, the weight curving your posture forward, dragging you down to the murky depths of the sea floor. The good news was that you kind of got used to it after a while. Got used to the gasping, brink-of-heart-attack feeling that followed you everywhere. All you had to do was grab one of the prongs that stuck out from the bottom of your sternum, give it a little shake, and say, “Listen, asshole. We’re not dying. We have shit to do.”
― Krystal Sutherland, A Semi-Definitive List of Worst Nightmares

“She’d passed the fear barrier, and she’d lived, and she’d discovered not certain death, as she’d imagined, but impossible splendor. What other beautiful things had fear been hiding from her? What else had the curse long kept her from discovering? For the first time in a long time, she wanted to find out.”
― Krystal Sutherland, A Semi-Definitive List of Worst Nightmares

“Point is, you gotta be scared. Fear protects you. You gotta be scared right down to your bones" - he touched his fingertips to her collarbone - "for bravery to mean anything.”
― Krystal Sutherland, A Semi-Definitive List of Worst Nightmares

“Sometimes it was better to not get what you wanted. Sometimes it was better to leave beautiful things alone for fear of breaking them.”
― Krystal Sutherland, A Semi-Definitive List of Worst Nightmares

“That's the problem. That's what's wrong with love. Once you love someone, no matter who they are, you'll always let them destroy you. Every single time.”
― Krystal Sutherland, A Semi-Definitive List of Worst Nightmares

“One day,” he said, “everybody’s gonna wake up and realize their parents are human beings, just like them. Sometimes they’re good people, sometimes they’re not.”
― Krystal Sutherland, A Semi-Definitive List of Worst Nightmares

“Like HIV, depression was a king at playing hide-and-seek. It concealed itself in reservoirs deep inside the mind, waiting for the walls you built around it to eventually erode. Depression could be at undetectable levels for months or years. You'd be all happy and stable and think you were cured, you were a survivor, and then BAM, out of nowhere it resurged.”
― Krystal Sutherland, A Semi-Definitive List of Worst Nightmares

“Of course it’s not going to be easy. You’re fighting a war against yourself. Every time either side makes ground, you’re the one who gets hurt. But it’s not about winning the war against your demons. It’s about calling a truce and learning how to live with them peacefully. Promise me you’ll keep fighting. -Esther”
― Krystal Sutherland, A Semi-Definitive List of Worst Nightmares

“How could death not be appealing, when the only thing that gave him comfort in life was being unconscious?”
― Krystal Sutherland, A Semi-Definitive List of Worst Nightmares

“The magic had started to degrade, and Rosemary had slowly but surely become thoroughly, gruesomely human. And there were few things worse in this world than humans.”
― Krystal Sutherland, A Semi-Definitive List of Worst Nightmares

“Once you love someone, no matter who they are, you’ll always let them destroy you. Every single time. Even the very best people found ways to hurt the ones they loved.”
― Krystal Sutherland, A Semi-Definitive List of Worst Nightmares

“As she fell, Esther wasn’t worried about being blown off course and plummeting into the rocks below. She wasn’t worried about hitting the shallows and pin diving to the ocean floor and shattering her spine. She wasn’t even worried about Cthulhu. (Okay, maybe a little.) What she worried about was Eugene’s willingness to jump. The way he glanced down at the water far below and looked at it like it was home. The way he stepped lightly from the cliff’s edge, and the way he fell through the air faster than she did, dragged down by earth’s magnetic field. The way he flickered in the sunlight as he hit the water, the same way Tyler Durden flashed on-screen four times before you saw him solidly. Foreshadowing the twist to come. Eugene was afraid of demons, and monsters, and above all the dark, but he was not afraid of death. That scared her more than anything.”
― Krystal Sutherland, A Semi-Definitive List of Worst Nightmares

“Everything you want is on the other side of fear”
― Krystal Sutherland, A Semi-Definitive List of Worst Nightmares

“A thousand little moments had made Esther fall more and more in love with him, without her even noticing. A thousand little pieces of his soul had splintered off and dug themselves into her.”
― Krystal Sutherland, A Semi-Definitive List of Worst Nightmares

“If you didn't let people get close to you, they couldn't hurt you when they left.”
― Krystal Sutherland, A Semi-Definitive List of Worst Nightmares

“Esther wanted to make her brother understand that he was the sun. That he was bright and burning and brilliant, and without his warmth, without his gravity to orient herself around, she would be nothing. She wished they had that psychic twin thing, that she could push images into his head and make him see. Make him see that he was everything.”
― Krystal Sutherland, A Semi-Definitive List of Worst Nightmares

“Esther changed into a costume of Wednesday Addams, and then they went, the three strangest teenagers in town: a ghost who couldn't speak, a boy who hated the dark, and a girl who dressed as someone else everywhere she went.”
― Krystal Sutherland, A Semi-Definitive List of Worst Nightmares

“Esther supposed, as they held each other under a threadbare carpet of stars, that this was how it must always feel in the beginning. Yet even there, next to him, the most excellent person in the universe, she couldn’t stop herself from thinking that love was a pitcher plant. Sweet with nectar on the outside, but once you caught the scent and took the plunge, it ate you whole.
Soul and all.”
― Krystal Sutherland, A Semi-Definitive List of Worst Nightmares

“The old fear was there, the grapnel anchor lodged in her chest, the thing that wanted to pull her back away from the edge and whisper no, no, no. Yet there was a new thing: a lure. Something down in the water thatwhispered yes, yes, yes. Go forward, onward, into the unknown. It felt like something between destruction and thrill”
― Krystal Sutherland, A Semi-Definitive List of Worst Nightmares

“If something was once true but not wasn’t, was it ever true?”
― Krystal Sutherland, A Semi-Definitive List of Worst Nightmares

“Look, fearless people are stupid, ‘cause they don’t even understand what fear is. If I was fearless, I’d jump out of a plane without a parachute, or eat your mom’s cooking again. …”
― Krystal Sutherland, A Semi-Definitive List of Worst Nightmares

“What monstrous creatures humans would be if they could not die.”
― Krystal Sutherland, A Semi-Definitive List of Worst Nightmares

“The worst part was that anxiety didn’t just affect the way you thought, or the way you talked, or the way you were around others it affected the way your heart beat. The way you breathed. What you ate. How you slept. Anxiety felt like a grapnel anchor had been pickaxed into your back, one prong in each lung, one through the heart, one through the spine, the weight curving your posture forward, dragging you down to the murky depths of the sea floor. The good news was that you kind of got used to it after a while. Got used to the gasping, brink-of-heart-attack feeling that followed you everywhere. All you had to do was grab one of the prongs that stuck out from the bottom of your sternum, give it a little shake, and say, “Listen, asshole. We’re not dying. We have shit to do.”
― Krystal Sutherland, A Semi-Definitive List of Worst Nightmares

“The goddess of crustaceans, our lady of hard exoskeletons.”
― Krystal Sutherland, A Semi-Definitive List of Worst Nightmares

“What else was there to do? They were teenagers, and they were powerless, and until they were adults they had no choice but to let their destinies be bent and swayed by outside forces.”
― Krystal Sutherland, A Semi-Definitive List of Worst Nightmares

“Was love enough? If a person could offer you nothing but broken promises and disappointment, was love enough to make up for that?”
― Krystal Sutherland, A Semi-Definitive List of Worst Nightmares

“Nobody is going to care.”
“I care.”
“Too much. About too many things.”
― Krystal Sutherland, A Semi-Definitive List of Worst Nightmares

“As soon as you admitted to loving someone, you suddenly had a lot to lose. You freely gave them a way to hurt you.”
― Krystal Sutherland, A Semi-Definitive List of Worst Nightmares

“One day everybody’s gonna wake up and realise their parents are human beings, just like them. Sometimes they’re good people, sometimes they’re not.”
― Krystal Sutherland, A Semi-Definitive List of Worst Nightmares