Kathleen Glasgow Quotes

[...] who tests you on a novel? The whole idea of reading a novel, or a poem, is to come up with your own ideas about it.

Go be absolutely, positively, fucking angelic.

[...] if there's anything teenagers love more than jumping to conclusions and creating drama ... well, there isn't anything we love more than jumping to conclusions and creating drama.

Cutting is a fence you build upon your own body to keep people out but then you cry to be touched. But the fence is barbed. What then?

It could be disappointment, too, Tiger, and you need to prepare yourself for that. But if it's disappointing, it doesn't have to be devastating, does that make sense? Life has this, life has that, and then something else comes along again, like a wave. We ride the waves. You go down, you go up, you go down, sometimes you just drift.

He's like the desert itself: it's so beautiful, it's so warm, but there are sharp edges everywhere that you have to watch out for

I kept walking, but inside, I felt myself pause, just for a second.

You can't break my heart, she cries, breathy and furious. You can't own my soul. What I have, I made, what I have is mine. What I have I made, what I have is mine.

I think of those photographs taken inside waves, the ones with surfers in slick suits on boards coasting through the tunnel of water, eyes wide. I think they must feel protected inside that curl of water, inside the sudden silencing of the world, even if only for a few minutes.

It is a though he is spreading a veil of protectiveness over me, and I am greedy for it.

But there isn't a single word in the universe that you can think of that would describe the way you feel right now.

I'm so lonely in the world I want to peel all of my flesh off and walk, just bone and gristle, straight into the river, to be swallowed.

I'm so unwhole. I don't know where all the pieces of me are, how to fit them together, how to make them stick. Or if I even can.

I blink at myself. I could be a girl, a real girl. I could be a possibility, with Mikey. Couldn't I?

I don't feel sad. For just now, I don't feel scared. I feel, for right now, well, kind of triumphant.

She's not a cookie, or a book, or a record on a shelf. You can't just play with her and then put her back.

Don't let the cereal eat you. It's only a fucking box of cereal, but it will eat you alive if you let it.

There are so many people who are never coming back.

Sometimes you're so hungry, so thirsty for something to fill you up, you've craved it for so long, but when you finally have it, it hurts going down. It's not a medicine for what ails you. It might just be the thing that is keeping you sick.

Riley's sway as he disappeared down the alley, I recognized it. It wasn't booze. It was the thing that happened when a little too much got a little too messed up. They sway, it's what creeps over a person when they've begun to empty out and don't care enough to put anything back, to replace what has been lost.

Everything and everybody that's busted can be fixed. That's what I think.

There was a silence and then Alice, the oldest person in the room, cleared her throat. Alice has watery eyes and fluffy white hair and favors sweatpants and sweatshirts with glittery stars and flowers. Alice lost her mother when she was ten. That is a whole lifetime without a mother, to get used to not having a mother, and yet here she is. All these years later. Still grieving.

Alice said, "Write me a letter telling me how to live for the rest of my life without you." She paused.

"That was sixty-four years ago, and I still would like to know."

I'm writing this down because someday I will be Alice, with a whole lifetime spent without a mother, a lifetime of walking around with a Grand Canyon of grief in my heart, and people should know what that feels like.

This whole place is a world of sobbing girls.

She said,"Don't be scared, little one.

...I'm in a little bubble of warmth, just like I had with Ellis, a place I never thought I'd be again.

Evan always used to day that it wasn't that you couldn't see that you should be afraid of, but what was right in front of you, in plain sight.

And you know what makes me super mad? If a guy has scars, it's like some heroic shit show or something. But women? We're just creepy freaks.

Mickey holds up the soggy paper. DIE. Don't you die.

I'm no stranger to fucking up.

That's how hearts get broken, you know. When you believe in promises.

+"I think u are having a different sort of heartbreak. Maybe a kind of heartbreak of being in the world when u don't know how to be.

OUT. CUT IT ALL OUT. Cut out my father. Cut out my mother. Cut out missing Ellis. Cut out the man in the underpass, cut out Fucking Frank, the men downstairs; the people on the street with too many people inside them, cut out hungry, and sad and tired, and being nobody and unpretty and unloved, just cut it all out, get smaller and smaller until I was nothing.

It's sort of like that poem: I thought I was done with death, at least a little bit, but death wasn't done with me.

I room with Louisa. Louisa is older and her hair is like a red-and-gold noisy ocean down her back. There's so much of it, she can't even keep it in with braids or buns or scrunchies. Her hair smells like strawberries; she smells better than any girl I've ever known. I could breathe her in forever.

My first night here, when she lifted her blouse to change for bed, in the moment before that crazy hair fell over her body like a protective cape, I saw them, all of them, and I sucked my breath in hard.

She said, "Don't be scared, little one."

I wasn't scared. I'd just never seen a girl with skin like mine.

Oh, Leonard, I think. I'm in a heap of trouble.

I remember the stars that night. They were like salt against the sky, like someone spilled the shaker against very dark cloth. That mattered to me, their accidental beauty.

They should tell you, right when you get here, that that part of wishing is over. What we've done, no one will love us. Not in a normal way

There's so much I wish I didn't have to know about living.

People aren't nice, people aren't nice, you should know that by now.

They make me...they make me think of being stuck somewhere? I don't know, like weighted down, but then these patches...

I think you are having a different sort of heartbreak. Maybe a kind of heartbreak of being in the world when you don't know how to be. If that makes any sense?

What's really important is the essence of the life lived. A college degree isn't going to tell me how well somebody lived, now is it? Does having a boat mean you lived a good life? Or a summerhouse? What about saving each valentine your son made or even working a roadside jam stand? A million, what do they call it? - selfies - on some silly website. What does it all mean, in the end?

Charlie Davis finds her voice, and her solace, in drawing. I find mine in writing. What's your solace? Do you know? Find it and don't stop doing it, ever. Find your people (because you need to talk), your tribe, your reason to be, and I swear to you, the other side will emerge, slowly but surely.

defiant, and her words have rough, girlish hope. The

Dear Ellis, I have something really fucking angelic to tell you.

A girl's life is the worst life in the world. A girl's life is: you are born, you bleed, you burn.

...when I look at my arms, I don't think revolutionary. I think sad, and pain, but not revolutionary.

After he died, my mother was like a crab: she tucked everything inside and left only her shell.

But the fucked-up part is once you start self-harming, you can never not be a creepy freak, because your whole body is now a scarred and charred battlefield and nobody likes that on a girl, nobody will love that, and so all of us, every one, is screwed, inside and out. Wash, rinse, fucking repeat.

Girl listens to radio. Girl finds music. Girl has whole other world.

Girl slips on headphones. World gone.

I cut because I can't deal. It's as simple as that. The world becomes an ocean, the ocean washes over me, the sound of water is deafening, the water drowns my heart, my panic becomes as large as planets. I need to hurt myself more than the world can hurt me, and then I can comfort myself.

this book
is for the grievers
this book
is for the left behind
this book
is for every broken heart
searching for a home

... it's remembering what it's like to cut, and cut hard. The way you have to dig the glass in, deeply, right away, to break the skin and then drag, and drag fiercely, to make a river worth drowning in.

Who Knew I'd Make Her So Blue.