I try to see the dark and light in everything. This is my way of comforting myself when I am dealing with those emotions.
The true warrior isn’t immune to fear. She fights in spite of it.
Sometimes I wanted to peel away all of my skin and find a different me underneath.
I wish I wasn’t a girl who needed so much but a little free creature that slept in deserts and ran on clouds and lived on lilies.
My heart is a teacup with hairline cracks. I feel like I have to walk real carefully so it won’t get shaken and just all shatter and break.
She began to feel like the plastic doll she had been named after, without even a hole where her mouth was supposed to be.
I want him to see the flowers in my eyes and hear the songs in my hands.
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.