Some girls had mothers who never called them beautiful but swore their love up and down. It's all the same, really. All bullshit.

— Leah Raeder

Sometimes all you know about where you're going is that it's away from where you are.

— Leah Raeder

Suicide isn't really about death, though. It's about change. Release.

— Leah Raeder

The brain is an incredible multitasker. At the same time that it's piercing itself with superheated needles of anguish, it's ruthlessly making plans, contingencies, plotting out a future, giving zero fucks whether it'll ever see it.

— Leah Raeder

The brain is an incredible multitasker. At the same time that it’s piercing itself with superheated needles of anguish, it’s ruthlessly making plans, contingencies, plotting out a future, giving zero fucks whether it’ll ever see it. On the day I die, it’ll be calculating what to have for dinner as it bombards itself with pain signals from my amputated legs or my clocked-out heart.

— Leah Raeder

The whole summer was inside of us.

— Leah Raeder

We looked at each other with that resentment you feel when you want something so much it’s causing you pain, so much you start to hate it a little.

— Leah Raeder

Who fixes broken people? Is it only other broken people, ones who've already been ruined? And do we need to be fixed? It was the messiness and hurt in our pasts that drove us, and that same hurt connected us at a subdermal level, the kind of scars written so deeply in your cells that you can't even see them anymore, only recognize them in someone else.

— Leah Raeder

You can fall in love again with someone you're already in love with. It's like waking from a dream within a dream and finding another layer, the colors more vivid, the light more lucid, the fantasy more real. Being in love is an endless loop of waking to reverie.

— Leah Raeder

You know, rust is just oxidation. The same chemical process as fire. Oxygen interacts with steel, electrons drift from one element to the other. So really, rust is a slow fire. Isn't that weird? Water causes something to burn.

— Leah Raeder