We couldn’t imagine the emptiness of a creature who put a razor to her wrists and opened her veins, the emptiness and the calm.
In the end, it wasn’t death that surprised her but the stubbornness of life.
I don’t know what you’re feeling. I won’t even pretend.
I live my own life and nurse my own wounds. It’s not the best way to live. But it’s the way I am.
Depression is like a bruise that never goes away. A bruise in your mind. You just got to be careful not to touch it where it hurts. It’s always there, though.
Can you see me? All of me? Probably not. No one ever really has.
In the end we had the pieces of the puzzle, but no matter how we put them together, gaps remained, oddly shaped emptinesses mapped by what surrounded them, like countries we couldn’t name.
In the end, the tortures tearing the Lisbon girls pointed to a simple reasoned refusal to accept the world as it was handed down to them, so full of flaws.
The girls took into their own hands decisions better left to God. They became too powerful to live among us, too self-concerned, too visionary, too blind.
We knew, finally, that the girls were really women in disguise, that they understood love and even death, and that our job was merely to create the noise that seemed to fascinate them.
That was when Leonard realized something crucial about depression. The smarter you were, the worse it was. The sharper your brain, the more it cut you up.
There are some books that reached through the noise of life to grab you by the collar and speak only of the truest things.
You never get over it, but you get to where it doesn’t bother you so much.
All wisdom ends in paradox.
She understood that her heart operated on its own instructions, that she had no control over it or, indeed, anything else.
We realized that the version of the world they rendered for us was not the world they really believed in...
We knew that Cecilia had killed herself because she was a misfit, because the beyond called to her, and we knew that her sisters, once abandoned, felt her calling from that place, too.
Maybe the best proof that the language is patriarchal is that it oversimplifies feeling.
She may have looked normal on the outside, but once you’d seen her handwriting you knew she was deliciously complicated inside.
The mind self-edits. The mind airbrushes. It’s a different thing to be inside a body than outside. From outside, you can look, inspect, compare. From inside there is no comparison.