Spoiler Alert: This summary and review contains spoilers.
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Collected quotes from the Gayle Forman book, “Where She Went.”
“I know what I did to you was wrong, but at the time it also felt so necessary to my survival. I don’t know if those two things can both be true but that’s how it was.”
— Where She Went: Chapter 20 – Page 150
“I needed someone to hate, and you’re the one I love the most, so it fell to you.”
— Where She Went: Chapter 20 – Page 149
“I think I’m kind of getting the concept of closure. It’s no big dramatic before-after. It’s more like that melancholy feeling you get at the end of a really good vacation. Something special is ending, and you’re sad, but you can’t be that sad because, hey, it was good while it lasted, and there’ll be other vacations, other good times.”
— Where She Went: Chapter 20 – Page 144
“It would’ve been easier to die. It’s not that I want to be dead now. I don’t. I have a lot in my life that I get satisfaction from, that I love. But some days, especially in the beginning, it was so hard. And I couldn’t help but think that it would’ve been so much simpler to go with the rest of them. But you-you asked me to stay.”
— Where She Went: Chapter 16 – Page 123
“I planned to tell you, but at first I was so confused. I didn’t even know what was happening, only that I was feeling better without you and how could I explain that to you?”
— Where She Went: Chapter 16 – Page 121
“I feel tears coming. The only way to keep them at bay is to find the anger that’s sustained me and push back with it.”
— Where She Went: Chapter 16 – Page 121
“Quitting’s not hard. Deciding to quit is hard. Once you make that mental leap, the rest is easy.”
— Where She Went: Chapter 16 – Page 119
“I’ve come to realize there’s a world of difference between knowing something happened, even knowing why it happened, and believing it.”
— Where She Went: Chapter 9 – Page 75
“There were signs. Probably more of them than I ever caught, even after the fact. But I missed them all. Maybe because I wasn’t looking for them. I was too busy checking over my shoulder at the fire I’d just come through to pay much attention to the thousand-foot cliff looming in front of me”
— Where She Went: Chapter 9 – page 70
“Even at the start, when we were in that can’t-get-enough-of-you phase, there was like some invisible wall between us. At first I tried to take it down, but it took so much effort to make cracks. And then I got tired of trying. Then I justified it. This was just how adult relationships were, how love felt once you had a few battle scars.”
— Where She Went: Chapter 7 – Page 59-60
“So, this is how it’s become? This is what I’ve become? A walking contradiction? I’m surrounded by people and feel alone. I claim to crave a bit of normalcy but now that I have some, it’s like I don’t know what to do with it, don’t know how to be a normal person anymore”
— Where She Went: Chapter 2 – Page 26
“I want to cut through the space that separates us, measured in feet-not miles, not continents, not years-and to take a callused finger to her face. I want to touch her to make sure it’s really her, not one of those dreams I had so often after she left when I’d see her as clear as day, be ready to kiss her or take her to me only to wake up with [her] just beyond my reach.”
— Where She Went: Chapter 4 – Page 38
“Well, you’ve obviously got your theory, so don’t let the truth get in the way.”
— Where She Went: Chapter 1 – Page 17
“More and more lately it seems as though the majority of my conversations are with myself. Given half the stuff I think, that’s probably a good thing.”
— Where She Went – Page 11
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