Jessica Peterson Quotes

• “Sophia closed her eyes, willing herself to sleep.
  And woke that morning with a start when she realized she’d dreamt not at all of a glamorous turn at Almack’s on the arm of the Marquess of Withington.
  No.
  It had been Thomas Hope who’d taken captive her dream, whispering into her ear all the things he wanted to show her.
  
  All the things he had yet to make her feel.”

  Jessica Peterson

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• “But learning to love myself means loving my mistakes, too. I may really, really miss Rhys—God, I can hardly breathe I miss him so much—but I refuse to let what a guy thinks of me define my entire existence.”

  Jessica Peterson

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• “Do you ever get the feeling that you’re hiding who you really are to fit in? Do you ever want more? Not more stuff, but a life that’s more you, you know?”

  Jessica Peterson

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• “Private Arrangements by Sherry Thomas. So, so great. As far as contemporary, I’d say my current favorite is Landslide by Kathryn Nolan. Or The Kiss Quotient by Helen Hoang. Then there’s Kennedy Ryan’s stuff. It’s pretty damn incredible—I teach her books a lot in my classes. Tessa Bailey’s cop romances slay me in the best way. Oh! To go back to historicals, I adore Elizabeth Hoyt—she writes slinky, feely sex like no one else”

  Jessica Peterson

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• “Just like that, in a room full of family and friends and footmen, Henry and Caroline were alone, her voice low, his lower, as they grinned at one another. Was he imagining her burn, the same burn that coursed in the space between his blood and his bones? She couldn’t like him, or feel for him the things he did for her. He’d left her, he was maimed, a cripple, scarred on both sides of his skin. Why did he even try?
  
  Because of the way she was looking at him, now. He wanted to reach out and touch her face, hold her chin in his palm.”

  Jessica Peterson

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• “Laura,” Rhys calls after me. “Please…please don’t do this. Don’t walk away from me.” But I keep walking. People are staring now, and I’m crying, but I keep moving. I can’t look back. There’s nothing left for me there.”

  Jessica Peterson

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• “I haven’t changed a damn thing about my life. I felt a good deal of self-hatred before, when I couldn’t live up to the impossible standards I set for myself—being perfect, being thin, making everyone happy. But now I hate myself even more for not making any attempt to shed those standards. Change them.”

  Jessica Peterson

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• “I’m starting to realize that the connection we have—as glamorous as it may seem—is superficial. There’s something weirdly transactional about our relationship. Like Rhys keeping me around is some sort of good business decision on his part, one his accountant would approve of.”

  Jessica Peterson

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• “I’m realizing I’ve become an object, something pretty and pleasing, meant to be consumed by the media and Rhys’s fans, ignoring all along that I am someone who needs to get healthy, and have fun, and let perfect go.”

  Jessica Peterson

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• “Our relationship may look perfect from the outside, especially if you read the papers and the gossip sites. But it’s not. Being with him has made me miserable. Letting him sweet talk me into all this ridiculousness has robbed me of my self-respect.”

  Jessica Peterson

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• “Seeing her laugh and chat and eat with abandon made me ache. She is everything I aspire to be; everything I thought I’d become when I walked off the plane in August, determined to take advantage of my fresh start. Everything I set aside when I started hanging out with Rhys.”

  Jessica Peterson

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• “You inhabit this…this perfect world filled with perfect people. It’s impossible for me to let perfect go when I see how much you like it. How you practically worship it. I can’t be around it—you—and be who I want. I’m done, Rhys. We’re done.”

  Jessica Peterson

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• “He’s been playing ‘I Fall Apart’ on repeat for a week now,” she stage whispers. “I can’t stand it anymore! For the love of God, help us, before I start dreaming about pasty white men with face tattoos.”

  Jessica Peterson

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• “Romance is feminist. The reply was on the tip of my tongue. Romance is one of the few genres that explicitly puts a woman’s dreams and desires, sexual and otherwise, front and center. It’s one of the many reasons I love reading it.”

  Jessica Peterson

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• “Somewhere along this twisty, sometimes terrible, sometimes amazing path that led us to this moment, I fell in love.”

  Jessica Peterson

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• “But maybe Rob was on to something when he’d said I was checking off boxes just for the sake of checking them off. Not because they meant something to me, or they’d make me happy. But because it’s what everyone else was doing. Which, no matter how many boxes I checked, inevitably led me to fixate on the ones I didn’t.”

  Jessica Peterson

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• “Jesus take the wheel, ’cause I have no fucking idea what I’m doing.”

  Jessica Peterson

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• “The heat in his eyes contracts into something like pain. We’ve become toxic people—the kind who stab each other just to see who can bleed the most.”

  Jessica Peterson

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