Eventually, it becomes a matter of scale. When the good outweighs the bad, you stay. When the bad is the only thing you notice anymore, you think about your future, or what's left of it, consider options.

— Ellen Hopkins

“Stagnation is a slow death.”

— Ellen Hopkins

“The worst liars are the ones everyone thinks would never ever tell a lie.”

— Ellen Hopkins

“I thought he'd run if he knew. Instead, he offered help, not that I believed he could possibly help.
I thought he'd turn his back, close his heart, slink away. Instead, he promised sanctuary.”

— Ellen Hopkins

“You are my glue. Without
you, I'd be nothing but broken pieces.”

— Ellen Hopkins

“I've been alone since my mom met Scott.
He sucked the nectar from her heart
like a famished butterfly. No nurture,
no nourishment left for Kristina.
A vacation is a poor substitute
for love.”

— Ellen Hopkins

Some say death is a doorway,
belief the key. Others claim you only
have to stumble across the threshold
to glimpse a hundred billion universes
in the blink of single silver shard.

— Ellen Hopkins

“A daughter is a rainbow - a curve of light through scattered mist that lifts the spirit with her prismatic presence. Is a shadow - a reminder of something brilliant ducking out of sight, too easily drawn away. She is an aria, swelling within the concern chamber, an echo reverberating across a miniature sea. She is a secret, whispered, a hint of what we cannot know until it finds us. She is a sliver of her father, a shard of her mother. A daughter is a promise, kept.”

— Ellen Hopkins

I wasn't an alcoholic. I didn't drink every day, didn't often drink to excess or binge. And could leave it alone completely for large swaths of time. But I did drink to be social. To have fun with friends. Sometimes, to sleep. Sometimes, to forget.

— Ellen Hopkins

But how many young people truly comprehend the face of war until it's staring them down? You can't patrol unfriendly villages without embracing paranoia. You can't watch your battle buddies blown to bits without jonesing for revenge. You can't take a blow to the helmet without learning to duck. And you can't put people in your crosshairs, celebrate dropping them to the ground, without catching a little bloodlust. Paranoia. Revenge. Bloodlust. These things turn boys into men. But what kind of men?

— Ellen Hopkins

“Honesty.
Sobriety.
My virginity.
No way to regain
the first two, I almost
gave away the last.”

— Ellen Hopkins

“So much for deceit, for accepting blame. So much for never telling a soul.”

— Ellen Hopkins

“Who do they become when night descends, a cool puff of smoke, and vampires come out to party?”

— Ellen Hopkins

“The road snakes south, then north, ultimately taking us east, and I wonder if life is like that. Go one way, then another, to end up someplace else.”

— Ellen Hopkins

When you eat your favorite food, 150 dopamine units are released. When you have sex, 200 dopamine units are released. But when you use methamphetamine, 1050 dopamine units are released-five times more dopamine than is released during sex. Even cocaine use only releases 340 units.

— Ellen Hopkins

“I have to tell him how much i miss him when he's not here. So I snug my face against his pulse in his neck. "I love you" I wait, barely about to breathe. He tightens his arms around me. "I know, and how luck that makes me." I watch him go, wondering just what the fuck that meant to me.”

— Ellen Hopkins

“There is only Bree.”

— Ellen Hopkins

“What I don't like is what it sometimes takes to win. Backstabbing. Manipulation. Out-and-out bribery once in a while, and not always the monetary kind.”

— Ellen Hopkins

“Every word an author writes causes ripples, like tossing a stone into a pond. And you don't know where they'll go, or who they'll touch, or when they might come back to you. I think everything you do is kind of like that, too.”

— Ellen Hopkins

“Empty is the perfect state of being. Nothing inside to anchor you. Nothing inside to chain you down, keep you from living your dreams. Empty, almost weightless, you are an eyelash afloat on a blink of breeze. You can rise about tension and worry, loosed from the grip of gravity. Adrift in thermal lift, you ride the wing of freedom and soar. Empty, you are Eve in Eden. Empty, you are what you were meant to be.”

— Ellen Hopkins

“Good thing loving someone doesn't require caring about their parents.”