Book detail: The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue is presented as a focused source page for quotations connected with this book, collection, transcript, or source record.
Browse quotes from The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue.
The quotes below use the same card format as the rest of the site, including topics, source notes, copy actions, image creation, and sharing controls.
Read more
“She could fall into this moment forever, but she knows there is no future in it. Only an infinite number of presents, and she has lived as many of those with Sam as she can bear.”
Source: The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue
“Suddenly every word is full of weight, honesty is such a heavy thing.”
Source: The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue
“Of all the inventions Addie has seen her ushered into the world — steam-powered trains, electric lights, photography, and phones, and airplanes, and computers — movies might just be her favorite one.
Books are wonderful, portable, lasting, but sitting there, in the darkened theater, the wide screen filling her vision, the world falls away, and for a few short hours she is someone else, plunged into romance and intrigue and comedy and adventure.”
Source: The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue
“He assures you that you’ll find your calling, but that’s the whole problem, you’ve never felt called to any one thing. There is no violent push in one direction, but a softer nudge a hundred different ways, and now all of them feel out of reach.”
Source: The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue
“There's this family photo," he says, "not the one in the hall, this other one, from back when I was six or seven. That day was awful. Muriel put gum in David's book and I had a cold, and my parents were fighting right up until the flash went off. And in the photo, we all look so . . . happy. I remember seeing that picture and realizing that photographs weren't real. There's no context, just the illusion that you're showing a snapshot of a life, but life isn't snapshots, it's fluid. So photos are like fictions. I loved that about them. Everyone thinks photography is truth, but it's just a very convincing lie.”
Source: The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue
“She will learn in time that she can lie, and the words will flow like wine, easily poured, easily swallowed.”
Source: The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue
“I am stronger than your god and older than your devil. I am the darkness between stars, and the roots beneath the earth. I am promise, and potential, and when it comes to playing games, i divine the rules, I set the pieces, and I choose when to play.”
Source: The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue
“And there in the dark, he asks if it was really worth it.
Were the instants of joy worth the stretches of sorrow?
Were the moments of beauty worth the year of pain?
And she turns her head, and looks at him, and says 'Always.”
Source: The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue
“art is about ideas. And ideas are wilder than memories. They're like weeds, always finding their way up.”
Source: The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue
“There is a rhythm to moving through the world alone.
You discover what you can and cannot live without, the simple necessities and small joys that define a life. Not food, not shelter, not the basic things a body needs—those are, for her, a luxury—but the things that keep you sane. That bring you joy. That make life bearable.”
Source: The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue
“Time always ends a second before you're ready. Life is the minutes you want, minus one.”
Source: The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue
“Ideas are so much wilder than memories, so much faster to take root.”
Source: The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue
“history is something you look back on, not something you really feel at the time. In the moment, you're just... living.”
Source: The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue
“That is the madness of it. Every day is amber, and she is the fly trapped inside. No way to think in days or weeks when she lives in moments. Time begins to lose its meaning - and yet, she has not lost track of time. She cannot seem to misplace it (no matter how she tries) and so Addie knows what month it is, what day, what night, and so she knows it has been a year.
A year since she ran from her own wedding.
A year since she fled from the woods.
A year since she sold her soul for this. For freedom. For time.
A year, and she has spent it leaning the boundaries of this new life.”
Source: The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue
“Three hundred years, and some part of her is still afraid of forgetting. There have been times, of course, when she wished her memory more fickle, when she would have given anything to welcome madness, and disappear. It is the kinder road, to lose yourself.
Like Peter, in J. M. Barrie's Peter Pan.
There, at the end, when Peter sits on the rock, the memory of Wendy Darling sliding from his mind, and it is sad, of course, to forget.
But it is a lonely thing, to be forgotten.
To remember when no one else does.”
Source: The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue
“It can't just be about the other person. You have to be someone, too. You have to know who you are.”
Source: The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue
“You are whoever they want you to be.
You are more than enough, because you are not real.
You are perfect, because you don't exist.
(Not you.)
(Never you.)
They look at you and see whatever they want...
Because they don't see you at all.”
Source: The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue
“She stands there until she realizes she is waiting. Waiting for someone to help. To come and fix the mess she's in. But no one is coming. No one remembers, and if she resigns herself to waiting, she will wait forever.
So she walks.
And as she walks, she studies Paris. Makes note of this house, and that road, of bridges, and carriage horses, and the gates of a garden. Glimpses roses beyond the wall, beauty in the cracks.”
Source: The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue
“He always liked learning. Loved it, really. If he could have spent his whole life sitting in a lecture hall, taking notes, could have drifted from department to department, haunting different studies, soaking up language and history and art, maybe he would have felt full, happy.
That's how he spent the first two years.
And those first two years, he was happy. He had Bea, and Robbie, and all he had to do was learn. Build a foundation. It was the house, the one that he was supposed to build on top of that smooth surface, that was the problem. It was just so... permanent.
Choosing a class became choosing a discipline, and choosing a discipline became choosing a career, and choosing a career became choosing a life, and how was anyone supposed to do that, when you only had one?
But teaching, teaching might be a way to have what he wanted. Teaching is an extension of learning, a way to be a perpetual student.”
Source: The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue
“Did I ruin it?”
“Ruin what?” he asks.
“Us.”
“Addie.” He grabs her shoulder. She turns, expecting to see his face streaked with anger, but it’s steady, smooth. “It was just a fight. It’s not the end of the world. It’s certainly not the end of us.”
Source: The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue
“They teach you growing up that you are only one thing at a time—angry, lonely, content—but he’s never found that to be true. He is a dozen things at once. He is lost and scared and grateful, he is sorry and happy and afraid.”
Source: The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue
“When they were still together, when everything was a plural instead of a singular”
Source: The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue
“It is sad to forget. But it's a lonely thing to be forgotten.”
Source: The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue
“You are whoever they want you to be.
You are more then enough, because you are not real.
You are perfect, because you don't exist.
(Not you.)
(Never you.)”
Source: The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue
“She draws him out of bed, and into the kitchen, and Henry sits on a stool and listens as she makes an omelet and tells him about the first time she flew a plane, heard a song on the radio, saw a moving picture.
This is the last gift she can give him, these moments he will never have.
And this is the last gift he can give her, the listening.
And he wishes they could climb back into bed with Book, but they both know there’s no going back. And now that he’s up, he cannot bear the stillness. He is all restless energy, and urgent need, and there isn’t enough time, and he knows of course that there will never be.
That time always ends a second before you’re ready.
That life is the minutes you want minus one.”
Source: The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue
“A girl running away from a woman's life. She leaves behind everything she has ever known, and escapes to the city, disowned, alone, but free.”
Source: The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue
“It felt as if I had no choice. As if. . .It felt as if I'd die there.”
Source: The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue
“What would become of me?"
Those shoulders - the ones she drew so many times, the ones she conjured into being - give only a dismissive shrug.
"You will be nothing, my dear," he says simply. "But it is a kinder nothing than this. Surrender, and I will set you free."
If some part of her wavered, if some small part wanted to give in, it did not last beyond a moment. There is a defiance in being a dreamer.
"I decline," she growls.
The shadow scowls, those green eyes darkening like cloth soaked wet.
HIs hands fall away.
"You will give in," he says. "Soon enough."
He does not step back, does not turn to go. He is simply gone. Swallowed by the dark.”
Source: The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue
“Grief, deep as a well, opens inside her.
What is the point in planting seeds?
Why tend them? Why help them grow?
Everything crumbles in the end.
Everything dies.”
Source: The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue
“He tips his head back, the rain rinsing gold and glitter from his skin, flattening the perfect wave of curls against his skull, erasing all traces of magic, turning him from a languid, arrogant prince into a boy; mortal, vulnerable, alone.”
Source: The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue
“Memories are stiff, but thoughts are freer things. They throw out roots, they spread and tangle, and come untethered from their source. They are clever, and stubborn, and perhaps–perhaps–they are in reach.”
Source: The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue
“The past drawn like a silk sheet over the present.”
Source: The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue
“I am not some genie, bound to your whim." He pushes off the tree. "Nor am I some petty forest spirit, content with granting favors for mortal trinkets. I am stronger than your god and older than your devil. I am the darkness between the stars, and the roots beneath the earth. I am promise, and potential, and when it comes to playing games, I divine the rules, I set the pieces, and I choose when to play. And tonight, I say no.”
Source: The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue
“What she needs are stories.
Stories are a way to preserve one's self. To be remembered. And to forget.
Stories come in so many forms: in charcoal, and in song, in paintings, poems, films. And books.
Books, she has found, are a way to live a thousand lives—or to find strength in a very long one.”
Source: The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue
“I think there are many ways to matter." He plucks the book from his pocket. "These are the words of a man - Voltaire. But they are also the hands that set the type. The ink that made it readable, the tree that made the paper. All of them matter, though credit goes only to the name on the cover.”
Source: The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue
“You were the one who said it was just a game.''
''I lied.'' The words, a knife. ''You loved me,'' he says. ''And I loved you.”
Source: The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue
“But that’s the whole problem, you’ve never felt called to any one thing. There is no violent push in one direction, but a softer nudge a hundred different ways, and now all of them feel out of reach.
Blink and you’re twenty-eight, and everyone else is now a mile down the road, and you’re still trying to find it, and the irony is hardly lost on you that in wanting to live, to learn, to find yourself, you’ve gotten lost.”
Source: The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue
“Every time they hit the point where the evening splits, and one road leads their separate ways and the other road carries on ahead, they choose the second road.”
Source: The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue
“Freedom is a pair of trousers and a buttoned coat.”
Source: The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue
“It was such a lovely jar she had kept them in. But the glass is cracking now. The water leaking through.”
Source: The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue
“Abstracts, mostly. Nonsense art, my friend Jake calls it. But it’s not really nonsense, it’s just—other people paint what they see. I paint what I feel. Maybe it’s confusing, swapping one sense for another, but there’s beauty in the transmutation.”
Source: The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue
“Even if everyone remembered,'' Luc says, ''I would still know you best.”
Source: The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue
“And there will be a moment, as brief as a yawn, when she won't know where she is, and her heart will quicken—first with fear, and then with something else. Something she does not have the words for yet.”
Source: The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue
“Estelle used to call these the restless days, when the warmer-blooded gods began to stir, and the cold ones began to settle. When dreamers were most prone to bad ideas, and wanderers were likely to get lost.”
Source: The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue
“I do not want to belong to someone else. I do not want to belong to anyone but myself. I want to be free. Free to live, and to find my own way, to love, or to be alone, but at least it is my choice, and I am so tired of not having choices, so scared of the years rushing past beneath my feet. I do not want to die as I’ve lived, which is no life at all.”
Source: The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue
“Knygos yra būdas nugyventi tūkstantį gyvenimų - arba semtis stiprybės gyvenant vieną baisiai ilgą.”
Source: The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue
“The sun is high, the day hot, and she lays the dress out in the grass to dry, sinks onto the slope besides it in her shift. They sit, side by side in silence, one a ghost of the other. And she realizes, looking down, that this is all she has.
A dress. A slip. A pair of stolen shoes.
Restless, she takes up a stick and begins to draw absent patterns in the silt along the bank. But every stroke she makes dissolves, the change too quick to be the river's doing. She draws a line, watches it begin to wash away before she even finishes the mark. Tries to write her name, but her hand stills, pinned under the same rock that held her tongue. She carves a deeper line, gouges out the sand, but it makes no difference, soon that groove is gone, too, and an angry sob escapes her throat as she casts the stick away.”
Source: The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue
“Adeline has decided she would rather be a tree, like Estele. If she must grow roots, she would rather be left to flourish wild instead of pruned, would rather stand alone, allowed to grow beneath the open sky.”
Source: The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue
“Her shadow stretches out ahead - too long, its edges already blurring - and small white flowers tumble from her hair, littering the ground like stars. A constellation left in her wake, almost like the one across her cheeks.
Seven freckles. One for every love she'd have, that's what Estele had said, when the girl was still young.
One for every life she'd lead.
One for every god watching over her.
Now they mock her, those seven marks. Promises. Lies. She's had no loves, she's lived no lives, she's met no gods, and now she is out of time.”
Source: The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue
“I saw an Elephant, in Paris.”
Source: The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue