Beth Revis Quotes
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Maybe being alone in the sea, with its unexplored depths, its clawing-finger waves, really is safer compared to the land, where there are people and malice and death.
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I stare at the stars... And even though there are so many and they look so close together, I know they are light years apart. The glitter in the sky looks as if I could scoop it all up in my hands and let the stars swirl and touch one another, but they are so distant, so very far apart, that they cannot feel the warmth of each other, even though they are made of burning. This is the secret of the stars, I tell myself. In the end, we are alone. No matter how close you seem, no one else can touch you.
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Of everyone on this ship, even the frozen bodies of my parents, Elder's the only one who handed me truth and waited for me to accept it.
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I feel hollow inside, as if there’s a black hole where my heart was, as if I am caving in around myself.
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God, did they know? A year made the world of difference! This was one more year I could be with Jason, one more year I could live! I signed up for three hundred years. . . not three hundred and one!
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Death is easy, and sudden, and can’t be stopped.
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I hug my knees, burying my face in my arms. This room feels very large, and I feel very small.
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As soon as the words slip past my lips, I wish I could grab them with my hands and crush them in my fists. But I can’t. The words are there.
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I think death is easier than guilt sometimes.
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Dreams are like that: they go in and out of memories and scenes, but they're never real. They're never real, and I hate them because they aren't.
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Family is never really gone.
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Who are the real monsters?
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Eldest thinks power is control, that the best way to be a leader is to force everyone into obedience. Holding Amy against me, I realize the simple truth is that power isn't control at all-power is strength, and giving that strength to others. A leader isn't someone who forces others to make him stronger; a leader is someone willing to give his strength to other so that they may have the strength to stand on their own. This is what I've been looking for since the first day I was told that I was born to lead this ship. Leading Godspeed has nothing to do with being better than everyone else, with commanding and forcing and manipulating. Eldest isn't a leader. He's a tyrant. A leader doesn't make pawns-he makes people.
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There are countless reasons to be jealous. But that doesn’t mean you have to succumb to them.
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Sometimes home is a person.
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If I can only see him in madness, is it worth trying to hold onto sanity?
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I lean closer to him, so close I can smell his skin, and when I speak, I can see how the little hairs near his ear move with my breath. "I also want you to know that I won't kill you right away. But that you'll wish I had.
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More than the sound of my own beating heart, I miss the sound of a ticking clock. Time passes, it must pass, but I have no more assurance of moving through time than I have that I am moving through space. In a way, I’m glad: this means perhaps 300 years and 364 days have passed, and tomorrow I will wake up. Sometimes after a cross-country meet or a long day at school, I’d fall into bed with all my clothes on and be out before I knew it. When I’d finally open my eyes, it would feel like I’d just shut them for a minute, but really, the whole rest of the day and half the night was gone. But. There were other times when I’d collapse onto my mattress, shut my eyes and dream, and it felt like I’d lived a whole lifetime in that dream, but when I woke up, it had only been a few minutes. What if only a year has gone by? What if we haven’t even left yet? That is my greatest fear.
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The truth is, sometimes siblings have nothing in common but blood...Sometimes you stay up late at night, thinking things that make you feel like a heartless monster, wishing for something different and then feeling sick with guilt because you know what the cost of "different" would be...There's a difference between having no siblings and having a broken one.
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It was to apologize, and apologizing means he remembers what happened, and that means being trapped in a nightmare that’s already come true.
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Words are powerful things. They can start—or end—wars. People believe in words. They are the fundamental expression of ourselves, the division between human and not, the means by which we learn. And while people use words to teach, to express art, to proclaim truths, at the most basic level, people use words to simply say: I am here.
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I am as silent as death. Do this: Go to your bedroom. Your nice, safe, warm bedroom that is not a glass coffin behind a morgue door. Lie down on your bed not made of ice. Stick your fingers in your ears. Do you hear that? The pulse of life from your heart, the slow in-and-out from your lungs? Even when you are silent, even when you block out all noise, your body is still a cacophony of life. Mine is not. It is the silence that drives me mad. The silence that drives the nightmares to me. Because what if I am dead? How can someone without a beating heart, without breathing lungs live like I do? I must be dead. And this is my greatest fear: After 301 years, when they pull my glass coffin from this morgue, and they let my body thaw like chicken meat on the kitchen counter, I will be just like I am now. I will spend all of eternity trapped in my dead body. There is nothing beyond this. I will be locked within myself forever. And I want to scream. I want to throw open my eyes wake up and not be alone with myself anymore, but I can't. I can't.
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We are, at least in part, who we remember ourselves to be. Take away our memories, and you take away our selves.
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But how can I be disappointed in space?