Alexandra Bracken Quotes

“Let's carpe the hell out of this diem.”
― Alexandra Bracken, The Darkest Minds

“Ruby, give me one reason why we can’t be together, and I’ll give you a hundred why we can. We can go anywhere you want. I’m not your parents. I’m not going to abandon you or send you away, not ever.”
― Alexandra Bracken, The Darkest Minds

“Life isn’t fair." I said. "It’s taken me a while to get that. It’s always going to disappoint you in some way or another. You’ll make plans, and it’ll push you in another direction. You will love people, and they’ll be taken away no matter how hard you fight to keep them. You’ll try for something and won’t get it. You don’t have to find meaning in it; you don’t have to try to change things. You just have to accept the things that are out of your hands and try to take care of yourself. That’s your job.”
― Alexandra Bracken, Never Fade

“—I don't want to lose you
—Then why are you the one that keeps letting go?”
― Alexandra Bracken, The Darkest Minds

“Everyone needs reality to punch them in the face every once in a while. Keeps you on guard.”
― Alexandra Bracken, In the Afterlight

“A moment later, Liam's bright blue eyes opened, and he was seeing me. He just wasn't seeing Ruby.”
― Alexandra Bracken, The Darkest Minds

“Breathing him in wasn't enough, I wanted to inhale him. The leather, the smoke, the sweetness.”
― Alexandra Bracken, The Darkest Minds

“The most important thing you ever did was learn how to survive. Do not let anyone make you feel like you shouldn't have.”
― Alexandra Bracken, The Darkest Minds

“Maybe we had just gotten too used to being alone-- and maybe that needed to change.”
― Alexandra Bracken, The Darkest Minds

“The thing that scares me is that some part of me understands where they're coming from. They took everything from us, you know? Why shouldn’t we be able to take it back if we have the power to?”
― Alexandra Bracken, Never Fade

“Do I look as pretty as I feel?”
― Alexandra Bracken, Never Fade

“Jude was down there. He was down there. And the last place I would ever leave Jude was alone in the dark.”
― Alexandra Bracken, Never Fade

“Joseph Lister?" Liam said suddenly, cutting through the silence. "Really? Him?"
Chubs stiffened beside me. "That man was a hero. He pioneered research on the origins of infections and sterilization."
Liam stared hard at the faux leather cover of just Chubs's skip-tracer ID, carefully choosing his next words. "You couldn't have chosen something cooler? Someone who is maybe not an old dead white guy?"
"His work led to the reduction of post operative infections and safer surgical practices," Chubs insisted. "Who would you have picked? Captain America?"
"Steve Rogers is a perfectly legit name." Liam pass the ID back to him. "This is all...very Boba Fett of you. I'm not sure what to say, Chubsie.”
― Alexandra Bracken, Never Fade

“You are actually the worst person I have ever met,” Chubs said. “And people like you are the reason we have middle fingers.”
― Alexandra Bracken, Never Fade

“What?” The word exploded out of me. “What do you want me to tell you? You want to hear about how they tied us up like animals to bring us into the camp—or, hey! How about that time a PSF once beat in a girl’s skull so badly she actually lost an eye? You want to know what it was like to drink rotten water for an entire summer until new pipes finally came? How I woke up afraid and went to bed in terror every single day for six years? For God’s sake, leave me alone! Why do you always have to dig and dig when you know I don’t want to talk about it?”
― Alexandra Bracken, Never Fade

“Let’s see if I remember all of this—born in Charlottesville, Virginia, but raised in Salem by her mother, Susan, a teacher, and her father, Jacob, a police officer. Attended Salem Elementary School until your tenth birthday, when your father called into his station to report an unknown child in his house—”
“Stop,” I muttered. Liam looked over his shoulder, trying to divide his attention between me and the boy reciting the sordid tale of my life. “—but, bad luck, the PSFs beat the police to your house. Good luck, someone dropped the ball or they had other kiddies to pick up, because they didn’t wait around long enough to question your parents, and thus, didn’t pre-sort you. And then you came to Thurmond, and you managed to avoid their detecting you were Orange—” “Stop!” I didn’t want to hear this—I didn’t want anyone to hear it.”
― Alexandra Bracken, The Darkest Minds

“I thought I had escaped the monsters, that I'd left them locked up behind an electric fence. But the shadows were alive, and they had chased me here.”
― Alexandra Bracken

“I started at the beginning, the escape. Fleeing through the forest, meeting a new danger at every turn, the desperation that came with trying to protect everyone when you could barely take care of yourself. The boy with the bottomless dark eyes, the betrayal, the fire, the smoke. And by the time I realized I had told him my own story, Jude was fast asleep, tucked firmly into dreams.”
― Alexandra Bracken, Never Fade

“Chubs didn’t have to finish. I knew what I’d been when I’d found them: a terrified splinter of a girl who had been shattered a long time ago. I had nothing, and no one, and no real place to go. Maybe I was still broken and would always be—but now, at least, I was piecing myself back together, lining up one jagged edge at a time.”
― Alexandra Bracken, Never Fade

“Cate had told me once, a long time ago, that the only way to survive your past was to find a way to close it off behind you, to shut one door before passing into another, brighter room. I was afraid. That was the truth. I was terrified of the guilt and shame that would come flooding in when I retraced my steps, turned the lock, and found the girl I had abandoned. I didn’t want to know what the darkness there had done to her, if she would even recognize herself in my face.”
― Alexandra Bracken, Never Fade

“The scars of what had happened were still there, not glued together to try to minimise the appearance of them, but glowing with thin rivulets of gold - more beautiful for having once been broken.”
― Alexandra Bracken, The Darkest Legacy

“Power does not transform you, he'd said. It only reveals you.”
― Alexandra Bracken, Lore

“Jude was down there. He was down there. And the last place I would ever leave Jude was alone in the darl.”
― Alexandra Bracken, Never Fade

“That was a very moving speech, Trust Fund," I said. He flinched at the name. "But I'd prefer you tell me why you took this job, and why you're so worried about Daddy Dearest finding out about it?”
― Alexandra Bracken, Silver in the Bone