Maybe her own tears were the poison that made her grow.
Pain didn’t ever really stop, he thought; it just changed forms.
Love is the worst earthquake there is. Can crush you to the thickness of your bones. Love can be like cancer sometimes. Terminal. It can make you vomit. It can make you want to cut it out. It can take you over against your will.
Let’s not be afraid of anything that can’t really hurt us.
It was always a relief when she came home to him. Like water or food. Like music or that moment when you cut yourself with a knife and squeeze the skin and no blood oozes out.
Writing is very cathartic for me. As a teacher, I hear many students say that writing can be painful and exhausting. It can be, but ultimately I believe that if you push through, the process is healing and exhilarating.
In order to have bliss you have to be able to accept all the parts of the other, all the wildness and the darkness. You have to be able to hold on.
We no longer believe in fairy tales. But we will learn to believe in monsters.
I didn’t tell him that what I was most scared of, most haunted by, was something I didn’t understand and could never run away from. It was myself.
But death is stronger than that and when you cover your eyes you are the one who can’t see the dark. The dark still sees you.
Any alphabet book for children where ‘P is for Patti’ Smith and ‘X is for the women whose names we don’t know’ is something I can recommend, especially when the book is as well written, representationa lly diverse and vividly illustrated as this one.
I saw my own blood and I thought, how could I live in a world where this exists- where love can become death?
The most Beautiful people are the ones that don’t look like one race or even one sex.
Each of us has a family tree full of stories inside of us, Dirk thought. Each of us has a story blossoming out of us.
You have to make your own family, your own life.
It’s scary to become a woman in this world. We have to understand that some of the messages we get, messages that we are not enough, are there to keep our power in check. We can’t buy into these messages.
I am constantly thinking ahead to what I want to write about in the future, and when I’m done with one project, I give myself a little time and then start the next one.
Writing is literally transformative. When we read, we are changed. When we write, we are changed. It’s neurological. To me, this is a kind of magic.
Maybe he was real. Maybe I’d made him up. Either way, he didn’t think I needed him anymore. Maybe he was right.
Welcome Beauty, banish fear.