1
It wasn’t until I’d walked halfway across the parking lot that I realized: 1. I wasn’t wearing shoes. A. Or a shirt. 2. I didn’t bring my keys            A. Or anything really. 3. I’d just left a complete stranger in my apartment.            A. Naked.Whoever said one-night stands were supposed to be simple with no strings attached had clearly never met the disaster that was me.Cora Carmack
2
Garrick was panting when he replied, “You’re not forcing me to do anything. I just want you to be sure. You can say stop at anytime.” His lips pulled wide. “You don’t need to make up a new pet.Cora Carmack
3
No tragedies here, Roar. This world will make you a victim every chance it gets. Don't let it.Cora Carmack
4
The best parts of life are the things we can't plan. And it's a lot harder to find happiness if you're only searching in one place. Sometimes, you just have to throw away the map. Admit that you don't know where you're going and stop pressuring yourself to figure it out. Besides...a map is a life someone else already lived. It's more fun to make your own.Cora Carmack
5
Bliss, I don’t normally do things like that. But I was second-guessing everything about coming here, and you were everything I needed. I don’t know how many times I’ve stopped myself from coming over here and knocking on your door. And yes, seeing you with Cade was definitely motivation, but more than that... I just like you, Bliss. As a teacher. As a person. As a guy.Cora Carmack
6
Words streamed from my mouth, some familiar, some not. The last of the were, "I love you." He rose up off me with a grin. "If I'd known it was that easy to get you to admit how you feel, I would have done this a long time ago.Cora Carmack
7
Phaedra keeps saying she's being selfish. That she hates herself for it, but she does it anyway. She can't deny herself what she wants, even if it brings about her downfall and his." "And have you learned anything from our literary parallel?" "Not really, I keep thinking that she would do it all over again if there were a chance..a chance that it could go right. Even if 99 times out of a 100 the story ends badly, it's worth it if only once she gets a happy ending. .Cora Carmack
8
He wore his hope like a winter coat, layered over the top of all of him.Cora Carmack
9
She had hoped. And hope broke more hearts than any man ever could.Cora Carmack
10
My mother had told me once when I was little and had a friendship fall apart that some relationships just end. Like a star, they burn bright and brilliant, and then nothing in particular goes wrong, they just reach their end.Cora Carmack
11
Pain changes us. Mine made me want to be perfect, so that no one would ever want to leave me again.Cora Carmack
12
Then, slowly, like the sunrise peeking over the horizon, she smiled. She snapped the box closed. She didn’t scream. She didn’t run. She didn’t faint. There might have been a little crying. But mostly… she danced.Cora Carmack
13
She said she wanted my best line tomorrow after the show, and now I knew what it was going to be.Cora Carmack
14
Sometimes she was Aurora. Confident. Clever. Cultured.Sometimes she was Rora. Afraid. Alone. Ashamed.And more and more, she was Roar -- bold, brash, and increasingly baffled by the situation in which she found herself. And sometimes she was none of them, lost and adrift somewhere in between, like the wildlands between Stormling cities.Cora Carmack
15
Because you've got balls of steel.' I hated when people said that, like it assumed strength and being a male were synonymous. There was strength in being a woman. 'Spence, I don't have balls. Good thing, too, because they'd look terrible in the lingerie I'm wearing.Cora Carmack
16
The future is never just one choice. It's a thousand. And they never stop. You will choose your future every day of your life. And should you wake up one day to find that you regret the choice you made the day before, then you make a new one. Don't worry about whether you might be wrong someday. Worry about whether you're right now. Tomorrow can wait.Cora Carmack
17
Blind belief is a comfort; it is the frame that puts the rest of the world into context. It allows us to block out the things that don’t make sense, that which frightens us. It narrows our vision so that the world does not feel so large. Would it comfort you to have the frame of superstition? To believe that if you say the right words and sacrifice the right things, then your world will stay exactly as it is? Or do you wish to choose what you believe, what you trust and understand?.Cora Carmack
18
Each one you take is a commitment. If you break that commitment, the gods of alcohol will punish you with a hangover so bad you'll think Satan himself took a dump on you. -MiloCora Carmack
19
If brains could have orgasms, I'm pretty sure this was what it would feel like.Cora Carmack
20
Even the good things from our pasts still only belonged in the pastCora Carmack
21
Do me a favor? Be a gentleman tomorrow?Cora Carmack
22
The timbre of his voice went into that low register that made my insides curl in on themselves--it was like my uterus was tapping out a happy dance on the rest of my organs.Cora Carmack
23
I will call bullshit on that so many times that the word bullshit will lose all meaning. -MiloCora Carmack
24
Because try as I might, perfect doesn't guarantee me anything. I can't control whether other people will want me or love me or even like me. I can only control how I feel about myself.Cora Carmack
25
Everything in the world might be connected, but that doesn't mean the way we feel about them has to be.Cora Carmack
26
I hold her, and I know now why caring about another person is so damn scary. It's not that they won't care about you back, because that either happens or it doesn't. You live with it or you do everything you can to change it. The really scary thing is the moment you realize that for the rest of your life, you'll feel twice the pain, twice the joy, twice the fear. Twice as helpless to control it all, too.Cora Carmack
27
And all the restless energy floating through me keeps connecting to him and coming back twice as strong, like we're this closed circuit, and the longer we stay linked, the more powerful the pull between us becomes.Cora Carmack
28
We go through our whole lives thinking that we belong in one place and not in another. We think certain ideas and actions have to be relegated to the tiny little boxes we place them in. What if we just reacted instead? What if we take whatever the world gives us and instead of focusing on what it isn't, we enjoy what it is?Cora Carmack
29
You want to hear it? Fine. It’s a simple story really, about a pretty girl who was pretty stupid. She let a man touch her because she was scared to say no, and then she told her parents because she was scared to say nothing. Then they were scared to do anything that might ruin their pretty little lives, so they told the girl that it was nothing. That just being touched wasn’t enough to fight for. Too scared to prove them wrong, she kept going like it was nothing, and she let more people touch her, never knowing that she was handing out pieces of herself. Or, hell, maybe she knew deep down, and she just hated herself so much that she was glad to be rid of them. And life wasn’t pretty, but it also wasn’t scary until she met a man with two names who touched her without taking and made her miss the pieces she had lost. And now things aren’t just scary, they’re fucking terrifying, and I can’t do it. I can’t live like this, knowing all that I’ve ruined and that it can’t be fixed. .Cora Carmack
30
He caught my hands as they pulled through my hair, and pulled my body against his, and I felt all the holes in me. My sobs echoed through them like caverns, and I never would have thought empty could be made of such weight. I couldn’t breathe around it.Cora Carmack
31
I get what it's like to want something, but to try and force yourself to really believe that you don't.Cora Carmack
32
You're not horrible, Kelsey. You are vibrant and beautiful, and you burn. Burn so vividly. Fires can damage, but they're also beautiful and vital and they can purify and give the chance for a fresh start. You're not horrible. Not at all.Cora Carmack
33
Call it an issue. Call it baggage. But I really hated lies. They're ugly things, festering like wounds, spreading like disease. They're winner-less crimes that hurt everybody in the end.Cora Carmack
34
I always thought I was an extrovert until I became a theatre major. Then I realised I just didn't like silence.Cora Carmack
35
We spend so much time defending our choice to do this that it becomes hard to show any vulnerability at all. There's only so many times you can handle someone asking about your fall back for when things don't work before you start thinking that maybe the fall back should just be your plan.Cora Carmack
36
The future is never just one choice. It's a thousand. And they never stop. You will choose your future every day of your life. And should you wake up one day to find that you regret the choice you made the day before, then make a new one. Don't worry about whether you might be wrong someday. Worry about whether you're right now. Tomorrow can wait.Cora Carmack
37
Tell me I'm not crazy, " He said. I couldn't do that. I was nowhere near sane enough at the moment to advise anyone else on rational behavior.Cora Carmack
38
This funny thing happens when you graduate college. You hear so much about being an adult that you start to feel like you have to become a different person overnight, that growing up means being not you. And you concentrate so hard on living up to the term "adult" that you forget growing up happens by living, not by sheer force of will.Cora Carmack
39
We should live like we smoke– inhale the present and exhale the past.Cora Carmack
40
I’ll take my chances against your fickle heart if it means it’s mine.Cora Carmack
41
But sometimes you don’t know what you’re looking for until it’s already knocked you flat on your back.Cora Carmack
42
You are unbelievably sexy.Cora Carmack
43
It was like my uterus was tapping out a happy dance on the rest of my organs. God, I was dying the longest, most tortuous, and arousing death in the history of the world.Cora Carmack
44
Life was easier when you stopped caring, when you stopped expecting things to get better.Cora Carmack
45
Her eyes were a bottomless ocean that I would give up air to explore.Cora Carmack
46
Apparently having emotions equated to having a vagina.Cora Carmack
47
What? Just because I can't have you right now, doesn't mean I'm okay with him having you.Cora Carmack
48
In Texas, two things are cherished above all else- football and gossip.Cora Carmack
49
WAIT, WAIT! JUST one more! ”“ Bliss, there are children waiting.” And they probably hated us, but I was just so glad to see her smiling that I didn’t care.“ Yeah, well, they all just jumped on the bandwagon. Most of them weren’t alive when I read Harry Potter for the first time.” I turned to the Canadian family behind me and said, “I’m so sorry. This is the last one, I promise.” Then I took one more picture of Bliss pretending to push the luggage cart through the wall at the Platform 9¾ monument at King’s Cross Station.A little boy stuck his tongue out at Bliss as we left. I pulled her away before she could follow suit.“ That kid better watch it. I’m totally a Slytherin.”I shook my head, smiling.“ Love, I’m going to need you to pull back on the crazy a bit.”“ You’re right. Realistically, I’m a Ravenclaw.Cora Carmack
50
Oh how I had underestimated tender kisses.Cora Carmack
51
Your pain made you strong. It made youpassionate and alive. It made us both who we are. -CadeCora Carmack
52
Shiiiit. Cade weighs a lot. Way more than I thought! ” I moaned/sang.Cora Carmack
53
How much of my fever-induced dream was real? I felt safe assuming that my time as a bee was fiction, as well as a few mythological animals that I swear I'd seen. Then I'd lived on the sun with aliens.Cora Carmack