Robyn Schneider Quotes

“Oscar Wilde once said that to live is the rarest thing in the world, because most people just exist, and that's all. I don't know if he's right, but I do know that I spend a long time existing, and now, I intend to live.”

— Robyn Schneider

“If everything really does get better, the way everyone claims, then happiness should be graphable. But that's crap, because better isn't quantifiable.”

— Robyn Schneider

“She tasted like buried treasure and swing sets and coffee. She tasted the way fireworks felt, like something you could get close to but never really have just for yourself.”

— Robyn Schneider

To Cassidy, the panopticon wasn't a metaphor. It was the greatest failing on everything she was, a prison she had built for herself out of an inability to appear anything less than perfect. And so she ghosted on, in relentless pursuit of escape, not from society, but from herself. She would always be confined by what everyone expected of her because she was too afraid and too unwilling to correct our imperfect imaginings.

— Robyn Schneider

“That's all you can do in this world, no matter how strong the current beats against you, or how heavy your burden, or how tragic your love story. You keep going.”

— Robyn Schneider

“Being temporary doesn't make something matter any less, because the point isn't for how long, the point is that it happened.”

— Robyn Schneider

“The world tends toward chaos, you know, Cassidy said. You could too. Just write down a made up name, or even a fictional character. And the next person who finds this geocache, it's as though things really hapened that way. You have to at least allow for the possibility of it.”

— Robyn Schneider

“You're better off without me.
And I don't want to be around when you realize it.”

— Robyn Schneider

“You can always tell when it's Friday. There's an excitement specific to Fridays, coupled with relief that another week has passed”

— Robyn Schneider

Outwardly mocking, but never quite to the point if not wanting to participate.

— Robyn Schneider

“She didn't add the elements that allowed me to proceed down a different path. She lent a spark, perhaps, or tendered the flame, but the arson was mine.”

— Robyn Schneider

“I still think that everyone's life, no matter how unremarkable, has a singular tragic encounter after which everything that really matters will happen. That moment is the catalyst - the first step in the equation. But knowing the first step will get you nowhere - it's what comes after that determines the result.”

— Robyn Schneider

And so she ghosted on, in relentless pursuit of escape, not from society, but from herself.

— Robyn Schneider

“I made a decision that year, to start mattering in a way that had nothing to do with sports teams or plastic crowns, and the reality is, I might have made that decision without her, or if I'd never fallen in love with a girl who considered love to be the biggest disaster of all.”

— Robyn Schneider

“Not at all, I just don't understand how the Arch Alchemist became mortal all of a sudden."
"Because he split his soul into seven pieces and hid them all over Justice City," Toby retorted.
"You turned our comic book into a Harry Potter rip-off?" I spluttered.”

— Robyn Schneider

There. You see? You're just figuring it out now, but I discovered a long time ago that the smarter you are, the more tempting it is to just let people imagine you. We move through each other's lives like ghosts, leaving behind haunting memories of people who never existed. The popular jock. The mysterious new girl. But we're the ones who choose, in the end, how people see us. And I'd rather be misremembered. Please, Ezra, misremember me.

— Robyn Schneider

“No matter how screwed up life is today, today is just a collection of moments that stop and start where you want them to. And nothing upsetting matters when you know tomorrow's gonna be better than yesterday”

— Robyn Schneider

I don't know which is worse," Cassidy mused, "when people laugh at things that aren't funny, or when they don't laugh at things that are.

— Robyn Schneider

Steinbeck wrote about the tide pools and how profoundly they illustrate the interconnectedness of all things, folded together in an ever-expanding universe that's bound by the elastic string of time. He said that one should look from the tide pool to the stars, and then back again in wonder.

— Robyn Schneider

“One thing I've noticed is that the only places people insist you relax are the least relaxing places on the planet.”

— Robyn Schneider

We're living tragedies, just passing time 'til our funerals.

— Robyn Schneider

“I reached for the switch on my desk lamp and flashed HELLO.
The lights switched off in Cassidy's bedroom, and her flashlight flicked on.
SORRY.
"She's sorry," I told Cooper, because he didn't understand Morse code.
He lifted his head as if to say But you already knew that, old sport.
Her flashlight flickered again.
FORGIVE ME.
This time, I didn't hesitate.
ALWAYS, I replied.”

— Robyn Schneider

“At Latham House, we were asked to believe in unlikely miracles. In second chances. We woke up each morning hoping that the odds had somehow swung in our favor.
But that's the thing about odds. Roll a die twice, and you expect two different results. Except it doesn't work that way. You could roll the same side over and over again, the laws of the universe intact and unchanging with each turn. It's only when you consider the past that the odds change. That things become less and less likely.
Here's something I know because I'm a nerd: up until the middle of the twentieth century, dice were made out of cellulose nitrate. It's a material that remains stable for decades but, in a flash, can decompose. The chemical compound breaks down, releasing nitric acid. So every time you roll a die, there's a small chance that it won't give you a result at all, that instead it will cleave, crumble, and explode.”

— Robyn Schneider

We're two sides of the same tragic coin. It's like we were tied together before we even met.

— Robyn Schneider

The pause in conversation when you're about to introduce someone but you've forgotten their name. There's a word for it. In Scotland, it's called a tartle.

— Robyn Schneider

“You're the one who has to live with your choice. Everyone else will get over it, move on, no matter what you decide. But you never will.”

— Robyn Schneider

“But I know now that isn't true; history is filled with fictional people. And even the epigraph Fitzgerald placed at the beginning of The Great Gatsby is by a writer who doesn't exist. We have all been fooled into believing in people who are entirely imaginary-made-up prisoners in a hypothetical panopticon. But the point isn't whether or not you believe in imaginary people; it's whether or not you want to.”

— Robyn Schneider

“I had a massive bed at home, and I loved her dearly. She was my queen, and I was her loyal subject.”

— Robyn Schneider

“The perfect soundtrack for my personal hell.”

— Robyn Schneider

“You'll never escape the panopticon thinking like that.”

— Robyn Schneider

“Fine! You guys can all be beautiful snowflakes! I'm gonna go over here and be an awkward snowflake!”

— Robyn Schneider

“I learned three things that night: 1) sharing a bed is't nearly as intimate as making out in a too-small back seat, 2) inexplicably, some bras unhook in the front, 3) Cassidy hadn't known I was Jewish.”

— Robyn Schneider

It was like Latham: sometimes the point wasn't being the best, because it didn't mean you had the best life, or the best friends, or the best time.

— Robyn Schneider

“Cassidy sat down next to me, her dress teasing me as it fluttered in the breeze.”

— Robyn Schneider

“So I went to sleep thinking of her, of the curve of her back in a light cotton dress, of her hair twisted up into its crown of braids, of her, leaping from the zenith of the plastic swing set and clearing the sandbox, turning a neat lap around the whole of Eastwood, California, while I stood there, trapped in the dreariness of it all, numbly watching.”

— Robyn Schneider

“Everything of who I was and who I wanted to be had been evicted to make room for this disease.”

— Robyn Schneider

“It had hurt to accept what was wrong with me, but it hurt even more to have hope.”

— Robyn Schneider

“The dead never listen when you want to tell them anything.”

— Robyn Schneider

The death of a relationship. At least I was dressed for the wake.

— Robyn Schneider

“How could I have known, back then, that the white house across the park would belong to Cassidy Thorpe? That out of a row of nearly identical McMansions, there'd be one window in particular I searched out every night before bed, looking for secret messages?”

— Robyn Schneider

“No, Charlotte, I'm not going to tell him," I said drily. "The hymen of your integrity remains intact. Your precious jewel of a reputation is un-besmirched.”

— Robyn Schneider

“I read once that we're all just dead stars looking back up to the sky, because everything we're made of, even the hemoglobin in our blood, comes from the moment before a star dies.”

— Robyn Schneider

Come on, Cooper, we're going. Cassidy doesn't want to talk to us right now because she's mad I figured out why we broke up.

— Robyn Schneider

I almost wished he'd debated Cassidy in her ridiculous Harry Potter costume, so she could've wiped the smirk off his muggle face.

— Robyn Schneider

“I wondered what things became when you no longer needed them, and I wondered what the future would hold once we'd gotten past our personal tragedies and proven them ultimately survivable. When”

— Robyn Schneider

You in for Chipotle tomorrow? Taco Tuesday, gotta get some tac and guac!" "No one calls it that." I shook my head, grinning. It

— Robyn Schneider

“One thing I've realized about new places is that they're like jeans. Sure, they might fit in, but they're not comfortable. They need time to be broken in”

— Robyn Schneider

“Usually spending any amount of time with someone was a forcible reminder of how much I'd rather be alone.”

— Robyn Schneider

“One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest in the nurse's office? I know it'd be a tight fit, but it would be sort of perfect.”

— Robyn Schneider

“A snowman in a town where it didn't snow, made by a boy who couldn't wait to leave, and given to a girl who had never belonged.”

— Robyn Schneider