79 Quotes by Paula Stokes

Killing someone is different in practice than it is in theory. There are factors you can’t prepare for, feelings in the moment where you’ll question everything you thought you knew about yourself, other feelings that might follow you long after the deed is done.

My name is Winter Kim. Today I killed a man. Soon I hope to kill another.

When you care about someone, you can’t just turn that off because you learn they betrayed you.

I don’t make to-do lists, but if I did, today’s would have gone something like this: 1. get drunk, 2. get laid, 3. go surfing (not necessarily in that order.) Noticeably absent from the list: get arrested. And yet here I am, spending my eighteenth birthday with my back against the wall of the Colonel’s hunting cabin, two FBI agents prowling the dark with their guns drawn, both trying to get me to confess to the murder of my friend Preston DeWitt.

I remember a time when all I wanted was a gun and to learn how to use it. I thought a gun would make me feel safe. I thought a gun would make me feel powerful. But right now I just feel . . . heavy. Like I live in this world of death and destruction and I’ll never escape alive.

No,” Gideon says. “No guns. The most dangerous weapon you have is your brain. Give someone a gun and they tend to quit using it.

How do you make me smile when it seems like there’s nothing in the whole world to smile about?

Sometimes being poor means having to choose between your principles and your survival.

Healing is a process, not something I can accomplish in an hour.