my favorite quotes from "the invisible life of addie larue" by v.e. schwab

I reread one of my favorite books, The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue by V.E. Schwab, back in April before taking a trip to New York. It felt like a very fitting time to reread it since much of the book is set in New York. It also felt fitting since Addie is 23 when the book begins, and I turned 23 while rereading it. I adored this book when I first read it and somehow managed to love it even more the second time. It is a beautiful story about a girl who will do anything to live and a boy who feels that he is never enough. I hold a special place in my heart for Addie in particular, so most of the lines I underlined while reading were about her. I thought I would share some of my favorite quotes from this novel, some I remembered and loved from my first time reading the story at 19, and others that only stuck out to me when reading it for a second time four years later.

---

“‘A dreamer,’ scorns her mother. ‘A dreamer,’ scorns her father. ‘A dreamer,’ warns Estele. Still, it does not seem such a bad word.”

“But a life without art, without wonder, without beautiful things—she would go mad. She has gone mad. 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.”

“Adeline had wanted to be a tree. To grow wild and deep, belong to no one but the ground beneath her feet, and the sky above, just like Estele. It would be an unconventional life, and perhaps a little lonely, but at least it would be hers. She would belong to no one but herself. But here is the danger of a place like Villon. Blink—and a year is gone. Blink—and five more follow. It is like a gap between stones, this village, just wide enough for things to get lost. The kind of place where time slips and blurs, where a month, a year, a life can go missing. Where everyone is born and buried in the same ten-meter plot.”

“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.”

“But that is the brilliant thing about New York. Addie has wandered a fair portion of the five boroughs, and still the city has its secrets, some tucked in corners—basement bars, speakeasies, members-only clubs—and others sitting in plain sight. Like Easter eggs in a movie, the ones you don’t notice until the second or third viewing. And not like Easter eggs at all, because no matter how many times she walks these blocks, no matter how many hours, or days, or years she spends learning the contours of New York, as soon as she turns her back it seems to shift again, reassemble. Buildings go up and come down, businesses open and close, people arrive and depart and the deck shuffles itself again and again and again.”

“Dreamer is too soft a word. It conjures thoughts of silken sleep, of lazy days in fields of tall grass, of charcoal smudges on soft parchment. Addie still holds on to dreams, but she is learning to be sharper. Less the artist’s hand, and more the knife, honing the pencil’s edge.”

“There is a defiance in being a dreamer.”

“‘But isn’t it wonderful,’ she says, ‘to be an idea?’" They reach the High Line just as a gust of wind blows through, the air still edged with winter, but instead of folding in against him, sheltering from the breeze, Addie leans into the wild gust, cheeks blushing with the cold, hair whipping around her face, and in that moment, he can see what every artist saw, what drew them to their pencils and their paint, this impossible, uncatchable girl.”

“To think, she could have lived and died and never seen the sea. No matter, though. Addie is here now, pale cliffs rising to her right, stone sentinels at the edge of the beach where she sits, skirts pooling on the sand. She stares out at the expanse, the coastline giving way to water, and water giving way to sky. She has seen maps of course, but ink and paper hold nothing to this. To the salt smell, the murmur of waves, the hypnotic draw of the tide. To the scope and scale of the sea, and the knowledge that somewhere, beyond the horizon, there is more.”

“There are nights when she cannot sleep, moments when she lies awake and dreams of dying. But then she wakes, and sees the pink and orange dawn against the clouds, or hears the lament of a lone fiddle, the music and the melody, and remembers there is such beauty in the world. And she does not want to miss it—any of it.”

“And she is all that’s left, a solitary ghost hosting a vigil for forgotten things.”