Julie Hockley is a graduate of the University of Ottawa. She lives with her growing family in Durham Region, Ontario, Canada. This is her debut novel. Visit Julie’s website at www.juliehockley.com
“The problem is normal was'nt in my DNA. I was destined to be forever freakish.”
“You know, no matter how cool some guys think they are, when it comes to some girls, it's like they lose their mind. They start saying and doing really stupid stuff”
“My addiction to you is definitely a catastrophic weakness”
“It's not worth hiding your love away", I added artfully."This is why I don't want to talk about this with you," he said with exasperation."You've got this cute view of the world"His smile was warm, but his eyes were tight."You're beautifully naive Emmy...I don't want to change that.”
“Si, los cuervos son traviesos, les gusta jugar trucos en nosotros, pero también son extremadamente fieles a su especie. Cuando un cuervo esta luchando, buscara a su especie para sobrevivir. Se cuidan unos a otros como a una familia, lazos de sangre o no.”
“Colors. Would it be green or blue today? Maybe white—my favorite. A dark voice in the back of my mind offered no color at all as an alternative. I smothered that voice. The days of no color were simply too hard to bear. I needed color today.”
“The day i met Cameron,the pieces started to flow into place,and the night that Cameron kissed me,the day that he sat next to me and told that he loved me,that was when the last piece of me were snapped into place.Every other second,minute,hour that i spent with Cameron after that moment made the last piece of my puzzle grow stronger,so that it made the damaged,the broken pieces become insignificant-mere background noise.But Cameron had taken the last piece of the puzzle with him,and a black hole was all that was left in its stead.How do you recover from that? How do you survive?You don't, I resolved.There's no coming back from that permanent void left inside of you.You become a shell,going through the motions without emotion,like a robot,while the rest of me was wherever Cameron was...”
“Love is excruciating, especially when you can feel it slipping through your fingers and there is nothing you can do about it. Like someone was playing tug-of-war with my limbs, ripping to shreds whatever was left behind. What it would feel like when love was lost...I wouldn't survive that. I closed my eyes willing the tears to stay hidden behind my eyelids and focusing on breathing in and out instead of the pain that was ramming in my heart.”
“You'll probably die if you stay with me,' he told me.'Then I'm dead either way, because I won't survive without you.”
“How do you know when you're There, I had once wondered. Maybe you're lucky enough to notice the moment it's happening to you. Maybe you're able to block out all the other stuff that is, in the end, just background noise. But, most often, you don't know that you were There until you lose it, or until it gets taken away from you. When you look back, you clearly see that time, that place, when all the pieces of you had finally fit together to make you blissfully happy, make you your whole self. Like one of those jumbo puzzles that take up your entire kitchen table for weeks, the tiny pieces are just cardboard shapes with colors splashed on them, and they don't make any sense until you find their rightful place among the other pieces. When you put the last piece into place and the pieces now form a complete picture, that's when you're There. But while you were busy thinking about gluing the puzzle together, so that the pieces would never be apart again, someone comes from behind you, destroys the last piece and throws the rest of the pieces away. Even if you could muster up enough courage to put the pieces back together, the picture would never be complete again, because of the last missing piece...which, as it turned out, was smack in the middle, or in the heart, of the picture.”
“Whoever said that love hurts was wrong. Love is excruciating, especially when you can feel it slipping through your fingers and there is nothing you can do about it. Like someone was playing tug-of-war with my limbs, ripping to shreds whatever was left behind. What it would feel like when love was lost...I wouldn't survive that”