52 Quotes by Monica Hesse

I found a girl who wasn't the girl I was looking for. I let go of a friend I'll still miss every day. I'll go back to work. I'll get better. I'll get better slowly. I'll find all the secret, hidden things.

I would care that someone understood we were flawed and scarred and doing the best we could in this war. We were wrapped up in things that were so much bigger than ourselves. We didn't know. We didn't mean to. It wasn't our fault.

Girls in love will do desperate and creative things.

The absence of pain is not the same as the presence of happiness”.

We must love the people in front of us. We must forgive ourselves for the things we did to survive. The things we broke. The things that broke us.

Tow best friends meeting on the street to say so many things at once: I betrayed you, I love you, I want to save you, I’m sorry. All around Europe, people are dying by the hundreds of thousands. And here, in my city, the Nazis slaughtered a family because of events that started with love and jealousy and a slip of the tongue.

We need girls who are pretty so the soldiers don’t notice that they’re also smart and brave and working against them.

Fear. That’s right. That was the odor I couldn’t place before. That’s the smell of my beautiful, breaking country.

Lucky has become such a relative term, when the standards to meet it involve only not being treated like a criminal in your own home city.