Nova Ren Suma Quotes & Sayings

There are no mourners here. No tourists. No rubberneckers. No one to sideswipe Tommy's car. — Nova Ren Suma

The point is, every book we had could save us in a different way
only, we had to open it. We had to drop our eyes to the page and drink in the words that were there. — Nova Ren Suma

[C]ouches and chairs covered in scratches aim away from one another, making it possible for a dozen people to sit in this room at once and not have to talk to one other person, which is a miracle in furniture arrangement. — Nova Ren Suma

But no, it's not the Ori I knew. It's an Ori I never knew. The Ori I made her into. — Nova Ren Suma

Ruby told me it didn't matter what a boy was thinking about you so long as you had a good hold on what you were thinking about him. — Nova Ren Suma

Balance, Chlo ... Give and take. Push and pull. You for her, her for you. I think they're mad that I tried to have it both ways to keep you alive and her, too. — Nova Ren Suma

But no one fought for Orianna Catherine Speerling. — Nova Ren Suma

Sometimes it could be the smallest thing that could topple over a whole life, and, in the end, destroy it. — Nova Ren Suma

The story you choose to tell isn't always the story you believe. — Nova Ren Suma

We were gasoline rushing for a lit match. We bared our teeth. Balled fists. — Nova Ren Suma

We were alive. I remember it that way. We were still alive, and we couldn't see how close we were to the end. — Nova Ren Suma

I wondered how they could know so much about my brain without lifting open my skull and poking through it. — Nova Ren Suma

She smelled of deep, dark things and untold secrets and all of what she was keeping from me. — Nova Ren Suma

Ruby's stories didn't have morals. They meant one thing in the light and one thing in the dark and another thing entirely when she was wearing sunglasses. — Nova Ren Suma

They decide as soon as they meet you. Ten seconds in. If you're poor. If you're brown. If you're black. If you've got an accent. If your skirt's too short. If your nose is ugly - sorry, Cherie. If you're chewing gum. If you're breathing funny. If nobody from your family is there. If you're any of that? Or all of that? Have a nice life, because you're out of there. — Nova Ren Suma

Our private tastes in books showed a hint of our secret selves. — Nova Ren Suma

But when I asked where the extra doors led,Ruby smiled and said sometimes you need more than oneway to reach the outside ... — Nova Ren Suma

The other two weren't even dancers. They were football players. Which was ridiculous. — Nova Ren Suma

This is how I know blood is meaningless family connections are a lot like old gum -you don't have to keep chewing. You can always spit it out and stick it under the table. You can walk away. — Nova Ren Suma

Laughing (they thought we were laughing at them). Walking fast (they thought we were running). — Nova Ren Suma

Everything I know about bombs tells me they are built to explode. But something must set them off first. There must be a trigger before the noise goes off, before the big burst of bright, choking smoke. Otherwise a girl could stay quiet for years. — Nova Ren Suma

Home is where the heart is, and where the hell is, and where the hate is, and where the hopelessness is. Which made Aurora Hills pretty much like home. — Nova Ren Suma

Ori made it wanted. She acted like it was lucky. And forever after, it was. — Nova Ren Suma

Probably she died. Consumption. Fever. Mountain lion. I don't know. — Nova Ren Suma

I could tell he wanted the best for me. Of course, he assumed that would be getting out. Everyone always thought that, not of what we had to go back to, at home. Maybe our parents had thrown away our mattresses. Maybe they'd told our siblings we'd been run over by trains, to make our absence fonder.
Not everyone had a parent. It could be that nothing was waiting for us. Our keys would no longer fit the locks. We'd resort to ringing the bell, saying we've come home, can't we come in?
The eye in the peephole would show itself, and that eye could belong to a stranger, as our family had moved halfway across the country and never informed us. Or that eye could belong to the woman who carried us for nine months, who labored for fourteen hours, who was sliced open with a C-section to give us life, and now wished she never did.
The juvenile correctional system could let us out into the world, but it could not control who would be out there, willing to claim us. — Nova Ren Suma

There was something to be said for the bodiless feeling that came after the cold. Something I would always remember. When you forget how bad it hurts, you feel so free. — Nova Ren Suma

I sat there in the boat under her stars and her moon gated on all sides by the mountains watching the last bits of her breath float up and away. — Nova Ren Suma

Most people, in the end, really are all on their own. — Nova Ren Suma

We kept forgetting. And we also couldn't let go. — Nova Ren Suma

My Heart and Other Black Holes is alive with intensity, gut-wrenching honesty, moments of humor, and
of course
heart. This is an extraordinary debut by a striking new voice in YA fiction that left me in awe and moved beyond measure. Not to be missed. — Nova Ren Suma

We made the noise of savage animals, of men. — Nova Ren Suma

I stared down the wall, which did not stare back at me. I wouldn't let her rattle me. The cart barely had any books on it, and the ones there were just tossed on, upside down, disorganized. It hurt to look. — Nova Ren Suma

She wasn't getting it. They never teased her. They never followed her around with their phones, trying to catch her in a compromising position. They never called her a ho-bag or a troll or said she danced like an elephant on crank. They never, not once, dribbled pee in her ballet bag or stuck shaved pubes in her ChapStick. They never told her she wouldn't ever be good enough to make the New York City Ballet, and that they'd wave to her from the stage, maybe, one day, if they remembered who she was when they were famous. — Nova Ren Suma

Here was the moment to drop some wisdom from my three years, one month, and fifteen days of being incarcerated at Aurora Hills, but I kept it back. — Nova Ren Suma

I could see her smile. I wished I hadn't because it was the kind of smile she never gave to me. It was a smile for a boy who wanted to know her and never would. A smile for a girl who wanted to be like her and never could be. A smile for a perfect stranger. — Nova Ren Suma

My own drawing was a house made of books, but where there should have been a door, there was a book, and where there should have been windows, there were books, and where the chimney should have been open to let the smoke out, a book was covering the hole, so if anyone was in the house, they couldn't get out. They'd suffocate, to be found years later, a desiccated corpse still marking its place in the book it had been reading with a knobby finger bone, head caved in by an avalanche of fallen books. As I said, I liked books. — Nova Ren Suma

Maybe, long ago, we used to be good. Maybe all little girls are good in the beginning. — Nova Ren Suma

But then the stage showed other things. Bad things. Murderous things. Things I would never really do. And things I would forget about in the morning, because I'd wake up feeling a whole lot better. I knew right from wrong, Ori and I both did. We were not terrible people. We were not fools. — Nova Ren Suma

This is called closure, and it's also called justice, and they are not always the same thing. — Nova Ren Suma

To fit in somewhere in the world, even if there were chains and gates and fences to keep us from running. — Nova Ren Suma

Some of us had been running all our lives. We ran because we could and because we could not. We ran for our lives. We still thought they were worth running for. — Nova Ren Suma

I wonder who drove all the way up here to leave this piece of hate mail for the dead. — Nova Ren Suma

What I mean is, it reminded me of one of the happiest moments of childhood, before broken wrists and purpling bruises and nasty names hissed when my mother's back was turned. Before Who do you think you are? You're ugly. You're nobody. — Nova Ren Suma

I was an echo of her. — Nova Ren Suma

The ghosts tonight have already told their stories. — Nova Ren Suma

When writing fiction, memories still filter in, and these memories twist and distort and transform until they become living, breathing pieces of the story, as they have here. — Nova Ren Suma

There's something ugly about a pretty boy who knows he's pretty and assumes everyone else know it too. — Nova Ren Suma

Sure. I would go. Balloon or bus or thumb out onthe highway — Nova Ren Suma

In reality I was a pencil drawing of a photocopy of a Polaroid of my sister- you could see the resemblance in a certain light if you were seeking it out because I told you first if you were being nice. — Nova Ren Suma

It was Ruby's favorite kind of story: where the boys lost and the girls won and got a souvenir in the bargain. — Nova Ren Suma

Life. We'd long known it was cruel. — Nova Ren Suma

I was looking back into memories I didn't own, wanting in. — Nova Ren Suma

The last time I saw my mother, she'd turned her back on me like I was the bullet. — Nova Ren Suma

They forgot who she was:
Something fantastic we could never explain. Someone better and bolder than every one of us. Someone to paint murals and build bridges for. Someone worth every ounce of our love.

Someone powerful, but in the end not powerful enough. — Nova Ren Suma

It was hoped we might have two lives - the way cats are said to have nine. This life we ruined, and another, for after. — Nova Ren Suma

I knew that just because people on the outside were free and clean, it didn't mean they were the good ones. — Nova Ren Suma

Sometimes a perfect memory can be ruined if put to words. — Nova Ren Suma

He doesn't ask Sarabeth, he doesn't ask Tommy. The person he's asking is me. — Nova Ren Suma

It was the most private thing we had left - held even closer than our bodies, because our bodies were searched, all holes and crevices and cavities in every horrible way that could be imagined. But no one could shake out the truth from inside us. They couldn't search us for that.
Our guilt and our innocence were only our own, and she should know to keep it that way. — Nova Ren Suma

Teenage girls know more than we're given credit for. We sense danger even when everyone's telling us it's fine, he's a perfectly nice man, an upstanding member of our community, have you tasted his sugar-cream pie? — Nova Ren Suma