63 Quotes by Angela Panayotopulos

You have that look – the look of all runaways. But I will tell you what I tell my children. The caged bird sings sadly and dies quickly. Your heartstrings are not shoelaces – they were never meant to be knotted. It is important to set things free. You begin with yourself. And maybe a tissue.

Lexi was older now than she’d been in kindergarten. Her brain functioned with more logic and less emotion. Gabriel knew it would be harder this time. Now Lexi had to make sense of things before she believed in them.

The butterflies were performing circus tricks now, flying through hoops of fire. Lexi had read about infatuation once. Some writer had doused the romantic notion of winged insects. He’d said the funny feeling was simply the motion of common sense fleeing the body. It made more sense, in a world where few things did. Lexi smiled, reveling in the feeling.

A snake’s carcass sprawled across a third of the road. It was so mangled she couldn’t tell head from tail. Pieces of its shredded skin lifted and drifted in the aftermath of the car’s passing.

But anger is the world’s worst – and arguably most contagious – plague. It might look ugly on the outside, but it eats you from the inside out. If you catch it – and you will – you must accept it. It stems from the fear: understand that. You must fight it, you must heal, and you must let it go. Anger, when dealt with, is en ember that eventually dies out if you give it enough space and understanding.

She found a second blanket in the closet and curled up on the bed, feeling like the discarded toy of a spoiled child. She found a strange sort of comfort in the heat of her misery as the cold chilled her tears. In time, she would look up words like ‘doormat’ and ‘wimp,’ with Merriam-Webster definitions that would expose her to the faulty clockwork of her heart.

Love. It was the only explanation. That was what love did to you. It wormed its way inside you and leeched you of your courage. It made you weak, reliant on other people’s opinions and expectations. It paralyzed you.

The bus rumbled away, its gleaming yellow body disappearing around a bend in the road, consumed by veiny crimson leaves that shrouded the trees like sweaters threaded with blood.

The black snow on her friend’s face stole him from her in fragments, trying to spirit him away.