Gayle Forman - Where She Went (2011)

50 Sourced Quotes

View all Gayle Forman Quotes
Are you happy in your misery? Resting peaceful in desolation? It's the final tie that binds us The sole source of my consolation" blue

Gayle Forman
The world feels so big when you're out in the wide open. It's like you don't have a place in it when you don't have a home." "Your place is right here," I whispered, laying down and hugging her close.

Gayle Forman
How is it possible that a boyfriend ceases to exist from one day to another?

Gayle Forman
Letting go. Everyone talks about it like it's the easiest thing. Unfurl your fingers one by one until your hand is open.

Gayle Forman
It's the same thing that happens when I turn off a really good movie - one that I've lost myself to - which is that I'll be thrown back to my own reality and something hollow will settle in my chest. Sometimes, I'll watch a movie all over again just to recapture that feeling of being inside something real. Which, I know, doesn't make any sense.

Gayle Forman
But still, I find the need to remind myself of the temporariness of a day, to reassure myself that I got through yesterday, I'll get through today.

Gayle Forman
Standing here, in this quiet house where I can hear the birds chirping out back, I think I'm kind of getting the concept of closure. It's no big dramatic before-after. It's more like that melancholy feeling you get at the end of a really good vacation. Something special is ending, and you're sad, but you can't be that sad because, hey, it was good while it lasted, and there'll be other vacations, other good times.

Gayle Forman
But what if Shakespeare― and Hamlet― were asking the wrong question? What if the real question is not whether to be, but how to be?

Gayle Forman
Her eyes flutter up to meet mine. Are you hungry? she asks. Am I ever.

Gayle Forman
I like French fries," I say. I like French fries? I sound like a slow child in a made-for-TV movie.

Gayle Forman
I've been feeling something else. Like I'm about to be sucked into something powerful and painful.

Gayle Forman
In the calculus of feelings, you never really know how one person's absence will affect you more than another's.

Gayle Forman
It would've been easier to die. It's not that I want to be dead now. I don't. I have a lot in my life that I get satisfaction from, that I love. But some days, especially in the beginning, it was so hard. And I couldn't help but think that it would've been so much simpler to go with the rest of them. But you—you asked me to stay. You begged me to stay. You stood over me and you made a promise to me, as sacred as any vow.

Gayle Forman
You talked to me, but you didn't. I could see you having these two-sided conversations. The things you wanted to say to me. And the words that actually came out.

Gayle Forman
Except even at the start, when we were in that can't-get-enough-of-you-phase, there was like some invisible wall between us. At first I tried to take it down, but it took so much effort to even make cracks. And then I got tired of trying. Then I justified it. This was just how adult relationships were, how love felt once you had a few battle scars.

Gayle Forman
And then Adam Wilde shows up at Carnegie Hall on the biggest night of my career, and it felt like more than a coincidence. It felt like a gift. From them. For my first recital ever, they gave me a cello. And for this one, they gave me you.

Gayle Forman
How can it be so unclear to her when it's like the fingers on my hand to me?

Gayle Forman
Quitting's not hard. Deciding to quit is hard. Once you make that mental leap, the rest is easy. Really? Was that how you quit me?

Gayle Forman
But my hand has been clenched into a fist for three years now; it's frozen shut.

Gayle Forman
Suddenly, it's all too much. Bryn and the bump watch. Vanessa with my high school yearbook. The idea that nothing's sacred. Everything's fodder. That my life belongs to anyone but me.

Gayle Forman
You were so busy trying to be my savior that you left me all alone.

Gayle Forman
That's the thing you never expect about grieving, what a competition it is.

Gayle Forman
I know that unlike that night, tonight I won't kiss her. Or touch her. Or even see her up close. Tonight, I'll listen. And that'll be enough.

Gayle Forman
I can't imagine what it would be like to have had her company in my head—the comfort that would've brought.

Gayle Forman
You know, I thought about that a lot these last couple of years," She says in a choked voice. "About who was there for you. Who held your hand while you grieved for all that you'd lost?

Gayle Forman