Amy Engel Quotes & Sayings

...sometimes you have to hurt people just to prove you're alive. — Amy Engel

You're easy to read, Ivy, but the whole book of you is complicated. — Amy Engel

Often, when I am able to check out a book, I read it a dozen times before returning it, desperate to remain lost in the magic of someone else's story. — Amy Engel

He is such a child underneath all his alpha male bravado. A selfish child who thinks everything in the whole world is meant for him. — Amy Engel

How did you even know where to look?" "I'm the president's son, remember? I'd heard rumors about a group near the river, southeast of Westfall. I figured it was as good a place to start as any." "Why?" I draw back. "Why would you do that?" "Remember what I told you once?" He pauses. His fingers graze the sensitive skin of my waist underneath my shirt. "About not giving up on you? — Amy Engel

I've grown accustomed to the stars above my head as I sleep, the ache in my muscles as we walk the land. The freedom that comes with defining your world instead of letting it define you. — Amy Engel

I just want to be with you. Walk next to you, Ivy, wherever you're headed. That's all. — Amy Engel

We're all fucked up, Lane, one way or another. It's only a matter of degree. — Amy Engel

I remind myself of what [Bishop's] father's done. What he is still doing. But Bishop's touch is gentle, his intentions good. No matter how hard I look, I cannot find the blood on his hands. — Amy Engel

I'm glad she's not faking affection. It's more honest than what her husband is doing, at least. Dislike is an emotion I can respect. — Amy Engel

But there's something fundamentally wrong in a system where a girl like Meredith would even consider staying with a boy like Dylan if she has the chance to be free of him. — Amy Engel

I didn't have a bad childhood, but there was no magic in it. No one hit me, no one neglected me, but there wasn't much that was childlike about it. Even fun involved barely disguised lessons about my future and my father's plans. It is only now, away from the presence of my family, that I can admit that to myself. — Amy Engel

People. And the brutal things we do to one another.
The fence shakes against my cheek and I turn, careful to keep my gaze lifted. I don't have it in me to look at her again. Bishop is grasping the chain-link with both hands, knuckles white, his eyes closed. His whole body is wound tight as a spring, like if I reached for him he would simply break apart at the joints, splinter into a hundred pi8eces. I don't try to touch him.
He lets out a yell and then another and another, loud and wild and out of control. He shakes the fence hard with both hands. His anger and frustration are more potent somehow because they are unexpected. When his scream fades into silence, he rests his forehead against the metal. "Sometimes," he says, voice raw, "I hate this place." He twists his neck and looks at me, hands still hooked in the fence above his head.
"I know," I say, barely a whisper. "Me, too. — Amy Engel

No one survives beyond the fence. At least that's what my father always told me when I was a child. But I'm not a little girl anymore, and I no longer believe in the words of my father. He told me the Lattimers were cruel and deserved to die. He told me my only choice was to kill the boy I loved. He has been wrong about so many things. And I'm determined that he's going to be wrong about my survival as well. — Amy Engel

I like that he is complex, that the final result of all his pieces will be something unique and hard to solve. I have no right to wish it, and no hope the wish can ever be granted, but I still long to be the one to decipher him. — Amy Engel

Your eyes are still sad," she tells me. "But your whole face lights up when you look at him. — Amy Engel

I concentrate on the simple act of putting one foot in front of the other and continue moving forward even as part of me is left behind, beyond a fence I cannot breach. — Amy Engel

There are only two choices. Stay here and die. Or get up and see what happens next. — Amy Engel

Are you happy, Ivy?' he asks, surprising me.
In my whole life, I don't think anyone ever asked me that question. — Amy Engel

I'm not sure how we got to this place, where a girl's only value is in what kind of marriage she has, how capable she is of keeping a man happy. — Amy Engel

It would leave a little rotten spot, right here." I push my fist into the soft space beneath my rib cage. "Something that would only get bigger and darker with time. — Amy Engel

Bishop stares at me. "What do you want me to say, Ivy?" he asks finally. "That I agree with what my father did? That I don't? What's the answer you're looking for?"
"I'm not looking for a specific answer," I tell him, although the part of me that's been coached to kill him hopes he agrees with his father. "I want to know what you think."
"I think," Bishop says, "that we can love our families without trusting everything they tell us. Without championing everything they stand for." He delivers the words matter-of-factly, but his eyes are locked on mine. "I think that sometimes things aren't as simple as our fathers want us to believe. — Amy Engel

Love isn't something you can legislate. Love is more than charts and graphs and matching interests. Love is messy and complicated and it is a mistake to deny its random magic. — Amy Engel

You think I had a choice?" Bishop demands. "What choice? I'm not like your father or Callie, Ivy. I was never going to just let you go. I love you. There was never any choice. — Amy Engel

My father might not have held my hand or expressed his love openly, but he taught Callie and me that we had inherent values, that we were fully formed human beings without a boy by our side. — Amy Engel

He's an eighteen-year-old boy and this is his wedding night. I don't think he's taking me home to play checkers. — Amy Engel

When your fate is predetermined, there's not much benefit in coddling. — Amy Engel

That's what love is, though, isn't it? You don't stop loving someone just because they disappoint you. — Amy Engel

But recognizing the ridiculousness of an emotion and being able to master it are two very different things, I'm finding. — Amy Engel

Strange how the sound of a single word can hurt more than a ruined shoulder, cut deeper than a bloody gash. — Amy Engel

He glances back at me. "But there's hardly ever any activity outside the fence these days, at least close by. Only the people we put out, and they rarely try to get back into Westfall. I guess they figure it's better to take your chances out there than be guaranteed a death sentence in here."
"Either option sounds pretty horrible to me."
Bishop shrugs. "I don't know, sometimes I think we should just tear down the fence. Towns didn't have fences around them before the war and everything was fine. I think it was supposed to keep us safe, but instead it's made us scared. — Amy Engel

Life is one sick joke after another, I'm discovering. Because it hardly seems fair that it should hurt so much to finally get exactly what I've been wishing for. — Amy Engel

You can't outrun what's inside of you. You can only acknowledge it, work around it, try and turn it into something better. I may not know exactly where I'm headed, but this time I'm choosing my own destiny. — Amy Engel

Now I understand - how sleep allows you to forget, but your pain wakes with the dawn, worse because for a split second you don't remember what you've suffered. — Amy Engel

always believed in who I am even during the times I struggled to believe myself. — Amy Engel

Sometimes it's a revelation, even to me, how much more comfortable I am with cruelty than with kindness. — Amy Engel

I want to see you naked. I want to touch you. I want you to touch me. I just...want. — Amy Engel

But I want to be better than the lessons they taught me. I want my love to be greater that my hate, my mercy to be stronger than my vengeance. — Amy Engel

Even if most of the time we navigate so carefully we might as well be bombs trying not to explode, we are still always there, in each other's paths. Just waiting for the moments we intersect. — Amy Engel

He knows me better than anyone ever has. Than anyone ever will again. I would have stopped it if I could have. But I've learned the hard way, we can't choose who we love. Love chooses us. Love doesn't care about what's convenient or easy or planned. Love has its own agenda and all we can do is get out of its way. — Amy Engel

I know the days can get long if you don't have a purpose. — Amy Engel

I love you," he says quietly. I want to take his words, the truth of them I can see on his face, and cup them in my hands like a glowing coal from the fire. Keep them with me warm and bright, a talisman. — Amy Engel

Roanoke girls never last long around here. In the end, we either run or we die. — Amy Engel

The real danger has always lived in my granddad's kind voice, his soft caresses. All of it masquerading as innocent, but really just a gateway drug for girls starved for affection, desperate for someone to love them. He doesn't force us with a heavy hand. He manipulates with a gentle touch, guides us exactly where he wants us to go. So in the end, we blame only ourselves. — Amy Engel

I don't trust most people. Except for you."
"Why me?"
"Because everyone needs someone to put their faith in. — Amy Engel

And maybe that's love, too - feeling the other person's hurts like your own. — Amy Engel

Who do you want to turn into?" I mean the question to be mocking, but that's not how it comes out. I sound interested. I reach down and scratch my leg, trying to hid my embarrassment.
Bishop looks at me. "Someone honest. Someone who tries to do the right thing. Someone who follows his own heart, even if it disappoints people." He pauses. "Someone brave enough to be all those things."
A boy who doesn't want to lie, married to a girl who can't tell the truth. If there is a God, he has a sick sense of humor. — Amy Engel

I want to be someone strong and brave enough to make hard choices. But I want to be fair and loving enough to make the right ones. — Amy Engel

No one controls who we turn into but us. — Amy Engel

Is it still manipulation if you know it's happening, but it works anyway? — Amy Engel

He didn't save me, though. He allowed me the freedom to save myself, which is the very best type of rescue. — Amy Engel

Maybe I'll be okay. Maybe I'll make it to the ocean. — Amy Engel

I don't understand how the pain of losing him can be a pale shadow in comparison to the pain of finding him again. — Amy Engel

How do you measure the life of one person against the greater good? Can it ever be the right thing to sacrifice an innocent person? And how do you know what the greater good really is? — Amy Engel

My mission is not to make him happy and bear his children and be his wife. My mission is to kill him. — Amy Engel

I'm not a complete idiot, you know," I tell him. "I do think about alternatives if things were to change in Westfall."
Bishop swings his legs off the sofa and sits forward, facing me. "I have never, not for a single second, thought you were an idiot, Ivy."
"You listen to your father, too, don't you?" I ask him.
Bishop looks down at his clasped hands, then back up at me. "Sometimes I just think that because of who we are... the president's son and the founder's daughter..." He rolls his eyes, making me smile. "It's doubly important that we think for ourselves. We're not our parents. We don't have to agree with everything they stand for. — Amy Engel

And I understand in a way I never have before that loving someone is always going to feel like flying - the unthinkable drop, the fear of falling, the heart-in-your-throat thrill. It is always going to be impossible until the moment that it's not and you're soaring on pure faith, your altitude completely dependant upon something you can't control. — Amy Engel

Relax," the girl says. She holds out a hand but doesn't touch me. "We're not going to hurt you."
"Yet," the man in the doorway says with a smirk. — Amy Engel

The scars are just something that happened to me. They aren't me. Not anymore. — Amy Engel

He blows out a breath, takes a step toward me. The hallway is so narrow that I'm pinned between the wall and his body, heat rolling off him in waves. "Yeah," he says, voice low. "I feel things." His green eyes burn. It's the most emotion I've seen from him so far, and I have trouble taking a full breath, my lungs compressed with tension. "That's the whole point, Ivy. I want you to feel them, too. — Amy Engel