Quotes About Love & Sadness from “Our Chemical Hearts” by Krystal Sutherland

Krystal Sutherland’s “Our Chemical Hearts” is a young adult novel about first love, grief, broken hearts and school, friendships among other teen-related themes. Many find this book to be equal to somewhat an amalgamation of Looking For Alaska (by John Green) and All The Bright Places (by Jennifer Niven). This book has also been adapted into a movie starring Lili Reinhart and Austin Abrams. It was produced by Amazon Studios. The reason I hold this book close to my heart is because of the quotes I found in it. I have been reading books of the young-adult genre for quite some time now, and this book, by far, has many sweet words that knocked my socks off. 

Here, 10 beautiful quotes about love & sadness among all things:

• “Love doesn’t need to last a lifetime for it to be real. You can’t judge the quality of love by the length of time it lasts. Everything dies, love included. Sometimes it dies with a person, sometimes it dies on its own. The greatest love story ever told doesn’t have to be about two people who spent their whole lives together. It might be about a love that lasted two weeks or two months or two years, but burned brighter and hotter and more brilliantly than any other love before or after. Don’t mourn a failed love; there is no such thing. All love is equal in the brain.”

• “Just because a love ends doesn’t mean it wasn’t real.”

• “The best thing the universe ever gave us is that we’ll all be forgotten. […] I kinda like the idea. That when we die, despite any pain or fear or embarrassment we experienced during our lives, despite any heartbreak or grief, we get to be dispersed back into nothingness. It makes me feel brave, knowing I’ll get a blank slate at the end. You get a brief glimmer of consciousness to do with what you will and then it’s given back to the universe again. I’m not religious, but even I can appreciate that that’s redemption, on the grandest scale. Oblivion isn’t scary; it’s the closest thing to genuine absolution of sin that I can imagine.”

• “People are perfect when all that’s left of them is memory.”

• “I can’t lie to you and tell you that standing in front of someone and offering them your soul and having them reject you is not gonna be one of the worst things that ever happens to you. You will wonder for days or weeks or months or years afterwards what it is about you that was so wrong or broken or ugly that they couldn’t love you the way you loved them. You will look for all the reasons inside yourself that they didn’t want you and you will find a million. Maybe it was the way you looked in the mornings when you first woke up and hadn’t showered. Maybe it was the way you were too available because despite what everyone says, playing hard to get is still attractive. Some days you will believe that every atom of your being is defective somehow. What you need to remember, as I remembered as I watched Grace Town leave, is that you are extraordinary.”

• “They’ve poisoned you with this ‘love is patient, love is kind’ bullshit since you were a kid. But love is scientific, man. I mean, it’s really just a chemical reaction in the brain. Sometimes that reaction lasts a lifetime, repeating itself over and over again. And sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes it goes supernova and then starts to fade. We’re all just chemical hearts. Does that make love any less brilliant? I don’t think so.”

• “Space is the best cure for sadness that I know.”

• “Because I never realized that you could fall in love with humans the same way you fall in love with songs. How the tune of them could mean nothing to you at first, an unfamiliar melody, but quickly turn into a symphony carved across your skin; a hymn in the web of your veins; a harmony stitched into the lining of your soul.”

• “Maybe we’re both in love with ideas.”

• “It didn’t matter – the sun would swallow the Earth and everything we did here didn’t matter, shouldn’t matter – but it did.”

Have you read the book? Did you like it? Which is your favorite quote? Tell us in the comments below!