Cora Carmack Quotes

“If brains could have orgasms, I'm pretty sure this was what it would feel like.”

— Cora Carmack

“But fear lets us know we're alive. It tells me that you care about what happens between us because the mind doesn't waste time being scared about things that don't matter.”

— Cora Carmack

“Take notes, boys! The ladies always love a man who can play an instrument!" Lindsay snorted, "Your instrument doesn't even like girls, Rusty!"
"Doesn't mean they don't like it!”

— Cora Carmack

“You don't realize how small you really are until you're faced with something like that. We live our lives as if we're at the center of our own universe, but we're just tiny pieces of a shattered whole.”

— Cora Carmack

“She said she wanted my best line tomorrow after the show, and now I knew what it was going to be.”

— Cora Carmack

“I'm glad you fought for me," she said.
"I'm glad you let me.”

— Cora Carmack

“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

“I think everyone does. Even happy people. They may not admit it to anyone, but I think they feel it. I think they close their eyes, or go for a run, or take a long shower, so that hey can forget just for a second who they are and what they have to do day in and day out.
Living is hard.
And every day our feet get heavier and we pick up more baggage. So, we stop and take a breath, close our eyes, reset our minds. It's natural. As long as you open your eyes and keep going.
(Cade)”

— Cora Carmack

“You're lucky this is a big night for you, Bliss. Normally, nobody gets between me and my tequila.”

— Cora Carmack

“Sorry about that."
"You didn't hear me complaining."
I raised an eyebrow and said, "Forget about it. You will never see me in that skirt."
"Never? Is that a challenge, love?"
"It's a promise.”

— Cora Carmack

“Apparently having emotions equated to having a vagina.”

— Cora Carmack

“I wanted to crawl into a hole and die.
I wanted to crawl into a hole at the bottom of a ravine, then be buried under an avalanche, and then die.
I wanted ... to cry.”

— Cora Carmack

“God, do they make WD-40 for flirting? Because I am rusty.”

— Cora Carmack

But sex ... that was the opposite of control. There were emotions, and attraction, and that pesky other person that just had to be involved. Not my idea of fun.

— Cora Carmack

“I let people go.”

— Cora Carmack

“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

“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

“I was going to be so terrible at this ... the worst he'd ever had probably. And then he'd never want to see me again (and I really wanted to see him again). I'd probably be traumatized and never want to have sex again, which meant every relationship for the rest of my life would fail, and I would end up alone and miserable with nine cats and a ferret.”

— Cora Carmack

I give up. In the war for my parents' approval, I'd lost to a complete stranger.

— Cora Carmack

“There was no room for unhappiness when squeezed between two sets of washboard abs.
New life motto, right there.”

— Cora Carmack

“Fact is, knowing what you want and knowing who you are ... those are two separate things. One is complicated. The other isn't. You're trying to take something simple and make it hard, and there's enough hard things in life without you adding more for yourself.”

— Cora Carmack

“Hold your breath and close your eyes
Distract yourself with other guys
It's no surprise, your defeated sighs
Aren't you tired of the lies?”

— Cora Carmack

Of course I want you. Have you seen you?"
"I see you."
She swallows, and her eyes bore into mine when she replies. "Yeah, I think you do.

— Cora Carmack

The way she talks about dance is a little like how I feel when I look at her. Overwhelmed and fulfilled and falling apart all at the same time.

— Cora Carmack

It's not that I don't like cats. And really, I think I would enjoy having ... a cat. But what if I get a cat before I'm ready? What if I choose the wrong cat? Or what if I'm bad at it ... being a cat owner, I mean?

— Cora Carmack

I wanted a way back to swings and slides and simplicity. A way back to when a butterfly could cheer me up, and a series of puddles could make my day. A way back to a time when happiness wasn't something I had to search for ... it just was

— Cora Carmack

“Haven't you ever wanted to do something that everyone tells you is impossible and pointless? Haven't you ever cared about something enough to sacrifice for it? Regardless of how stupid or unlikely it seems. Haven't you ever wanted things to be different?”

— Cora Carmack

“I'm frustrated. I just don't know what you want from me.”

— Cora Carmack

You don't realize how many bridges there are until the sight of one collapses something inside of you.

— Cora Carmack

“It's such a stupid thing. I've had my arm around more girls that I could possibly remember, but in this moment with this girl, who is so far above me I might as well be trying to scoop up the stars, it feels a little bit like a hard-earned first down.”

— Cora Carmack

“And as much as I was dying to know, I also knew that there was bliss in oblivion.”

— Cora Carmack

“I told you I would never let anything bad happen to you.”

— Cora Carmack

“The only thing we can do is try to find people whose scars compliment our own.”

— Cora Carmack

“Then she's gone, and it feels like everything I've built here is seconds away from crumbling around me. Like a house of cards destroyed by a simple breath. And all I can think is if things are going to fall apart, I'm not going to stand here trying to catch the pieces.”

— Cora Carmack

“I'm not dealing with it at all. I'm fucking disintergrating, but I'm not dealing.”

— Cora Carmack

“Getting angry at him won't change the fact that you're angry at yourself.”

— Cora Carmack

“Our oh-so-brief relationship had been like spending a day in the sunlight when you've lived your whole life underground (my former self being the mole man in this story). Maybe that was all we got when it came to relationships like that - flashes of sunlight. Maybe it was too bright to be sustained for any extended period of time. Maybe I should be thankful.”

— Cora Carmack

“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

“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

“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

I don't know why, but most of my life has felt . . . conditional, like my parents and Henry and everyone else accepted me because I filled these holes in their lives. And I made sure I filled them perfectly because that was how I belonged, how I guaranteed my spot, by never failing to live up to their expectations. As long as I was perfect, they would have no need to cut me loose.

— Cora Carmack

“Some people just aren't as fond of freedom of speech as I am.”

— Cora Carmack

“I'm already there.”

— Cora Carmack

“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

“I will call bullshit on that so many times that the word bullshit will lose all meaning. -Milo”

— Cora Carmack

“Don't tell me your speechless, princess.”

— Cora Carmack

You told me once that history matters, but it's frozen, set in stone. This is part of our history. I can't change it or undo it. But it doesn't have to dictate our future.

— Cora Carmack

“I love her, and I love Mom, and I would do just about anything for them. But when you think stuff like that ... you think of grand, heroic gestures. Pushing someone out of the way of a moving vehicle. Standing between them and danger. Sacrificing something important. But it's not like that. Not at all. It's not one big moment, it's a thousand. It's every day. And you don't sacrifice just one important thing, you sacrifice a little more and a little more until you start to feel hollowed out. It's not the sacrifice that hurts so much as the thought that it will never end. That you're stuck in your fate, and nothing and no one can change it. You'll just keep giving and giving until you don't even know who you are.”

— Cora Carmack

I nodded. Nodding was all I knew how to do, all I understood. Nodding, at least, still made sense.

— Cora Carmack

“This is what it is to be a muse. I walk the line between want and need, between power and submission. And I make the hard choices.”

— Cora Carmack