We have talked about this book everywhere, and we intend on doing so for the rest of our lives. This book made us want to read Shakespeare and run off to an elite school where we could dream and be ourselves. But it’s more than that.
If We Were Villains was probably the first dark academia book we read, and it stayed with us because it’s actually good. The plot was interesting and kept us hooked, but the ending was haunting; this book is THE best choice for people who are nerds, lovers of poetry and classics, and want to escape to a world where we can be honest and real, instead of a shell of a person. This book is everything.
If you love poetry, drama, even dramatic souls, words, theatre, and love to be a pretentious person, then you have to read this book right now because you won’t regret it.
Here are some of our favorite quotes from the book, in case you decide to read the book! Or if you don’t, then maybe these quotes may intrigue you a little, and who knows, you may pick this book next!
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“For someone who loved words as much as I did, it was amazing how often they failed me.”
“You can justify anything if you do it poetically enough.”
“Were you in love with him?’
‘Yes,’ I say, simply. ‘Yes, I was.’ It’s not the whole truth. The whole truth is, I’m in love with him still.”
“But that is how a tragedy like ours or King Lear breaks your heart—by making you believe that the ending might still be happy until the very last minute.”
“One thing I’m sure Colborne will never understand is that I need language to live, like food—lexemes and morphemes and morsels of meaning nourish me with the knowledge that, yes, there is a word for this. Someone else has felt it before.”
“What is more important, that Caesar is assassinated or that he is assassinated by his intimate friends? … That,’ Frederick said, ‘is where the tragedy is.”
“How tremendous the agony of unmade decisions.”
“Per aspera ad astra. I’d heard a variety of translations, but the one I liked best was Through the thorns, to the stars.”
“Actors are by nature volatile—alchemic creatures composed of incendiary elements, emotion and ego and envy. Heat them up, stir them together, and sometimes you get gold. Sometimes disaster.”
“Which of us could say we were more sinned against than sinning? We were so easily manipulated – confusion made a masterpiece of us.”
“There is no comfort like complicity.”
“The things about Shakespeare is, he’s so eloquent…he speaks the unspeakable. He turns grief and triumph and rapture and rage into words, into something we can understand. He renders the whole mystery of humanity comprehensible.”
“Secrets carry weight, like lead.”
“I never asked where he went, worried he wouldn’t ask me to follow.”
“James laughed brokenly, and I felt something deep between my lungs crack clean in two.”
“You were real to me. Sometimes I thought you were the only real thing.”
“For us, everything was a performance.” A small, private smile catches me off guard, and I glance down, hoping he won’t see it. “Everything poetic.”
“The future is wide and wild and full of promise, but it is precarious, too. Seize on every opportunity that comes your way and cling to it, lest it be washed back out to sea.”
“Imagine having all your own thoughts and feelings tangled up with all the thoughts and feelings of a whole other person. It can be hard, sometimes, to sort out which is which.”
“The real sky was enormous overhead, making our mirrors and twinkling stage lights seem ridiculous- Man’s futile attempt to imitate God”
“Hatred is the sincerest form of flattery.”
“We’re only ever playing fifty percent of a character. The rest is us, and we’re afraid to show people who we really are. We’re afraid of looking foolish if we reveal the full force of our emotions.”
“One sin, I know, another doth provoke; Murder’s as near to lust as flame to smoke.”
“How could we explain that standing on a stage and speaking someone else’s words as if they are your own is less an act of bravery than a desperate lunge at mutual understanding?”
“When did we become such terrible people?”
“Maybe we’ve always been terrible.”
“But in Shakespeare’s world, passion is irresistible, not embarrassing.”
“Courage, man; the hurt cannot be much.”
“But I stayed where I was, afraid to move toward him, afraid I might lose my footing on solid ground, detach from what had anchored me before and drift out into the void of space – a vagabond, wandering moon.”
“I felt her sigh, and when she breathed her sadness out, I breathed it in.”
“I don’t know, it’s like I look at you, and suddenly the sonnets make sense. The good ones, anyway.”
“We had, like seven siblings, spent so much time together that we had seen the best and worst of one another and were unimpressed by either.”
“When it was his turn to speak, I watched him closely, uncertain whether he was acting only or if he and I were both gnashing secrets between our teeth.”
“I seemed doomed to always play supporting roles in someone else’s story. Far too many times, I had asked myself whether art was imitating life or if it was the other way around.”
“So what do you do? Ignore your grief, or indulge it?”
“Something changed irrevocably, in those few dark minutes, James was submerged, as if the lack of oxygen had caused all our molecules to rearrange.”
“He’d never been in my house, and I was self-conscious, embarrassed by it. I was painfully aware of the fact that we didn’t have enough books.”
“I knew by then the way the story went. Our little drama was rapidly hurtling towards its climactic crisis. What next, when we reached the precipice?
First, the reckoning. Then, the fall.”
“Anything can feel like punishment if it’s taught poorly.”
“You can’t quantify humanity. You can’t measure it—not the way you mean to. People are passionate and flawed, and fallible. They make mistakes. Their memories fade. Their eyes deceive them.”
“Do you blame Shakespeare for any of it?”
The question is so unlikely, so nonsensical coming from such a sensible man that I can’t suppress a smile. “I blame him for all of it.”
“Make art, make mistakes, and have no regrets.”
“His voice sounded flat, wrong, as if someone had struck a false note on the piano.”
“There were seven of us then, seven bright young things with wide precious futures ahead of us, though we saw no farther than the books in front of our faces.”
“What did she want to tell me that was so tremendous it had drawn tears from her, a woman made of marble?”
“Nothing unites men like a common enemy.”
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