Kerry Kletter Quotes

Most of the kids here talk constantly about the glorious day when they will finally be reunited with their families, never mind the fact that it was their screwed-up parents who messed them up and then dumped them here. That's another fact of life - it's really hard not to love your parents, even when they suck.

Suddenly I don't even care that I fell, because of that brief moment when I stood, and I wonder if this is what other people seem to have that I do not--this courage to fall because they have memory of standing.

The known universe always feels easier even when it's miserable.

Because just like all the other times I've drowned in my life, I'm determined to keep paddling forward, to believe that none of it has affected me at all.

It is a bone calm, a soul calm, as if the unnamable but constant rattle inside me has been silenced for a moment, given a source to express and extinguish itself, I think back to that saving voice in my head and I wonder how I can find her again - the me who is wise and unafraid, who believes I will be okay.

His words are like seawater to the shipwrecked: I'm tempted to drink them in, and at the same time, they feel dangerously deceptive.

That's the weirdest thing about being cut off from life. Everything gets washed out or muted or recedes into the background except for other people's laughter. Other people's laughter gets very loud and jarring. It penetrates. It is a reminder that other people live.

who insisted every day that I see my own worth beyond my mother's rejecting eyes. But of course, a mother's eyes are the very first mirror we look into, the image that gets imprinted on our souls - whether they gaze back at us with love or with disgust. So I don't know how to differentiate between her perceptions of me and my own when hers were the first I've ever known, so deeply ingrained from the second I hit the world.

I have seen this happen before, how one act of parental kindness across a history of cruelty can make a kid in here forgive everything that came before simply because they have been deprived of kindness for so long.

I had made the mistake of telling the truth, and the truth was the enemy.

They say the farther away you are from the beach, the louder it sounds. That way it's always with you and you can always find your way back.

It was when I discovered that there are two kinds of death. There is ceasing to exist, usually accompanied by a funeral and loved ones in mourning. And then there is emotional death born out of necessity and measured solely by the absence of grief it causes: the turning off the lights of oneself in order to shut down the feelings of being alive.

And then there is emotional death born out of necessity and measured solely by the absence of grief it causes: the turning off the lights of oneself in order to shut down the feelings of being alive. Eventually I just checked out of the world altogether, leaving behind only my body, like a snail abandoning its shell. Sometimes I would catch myself in the mirror, surprised to see someone staring back at me, a stranger whose face I struggled to connect as my own, whose body was visible and intact despite the feeling that I moved through the world as a ghost.

Wondering whether it's worse to be with other people and have nowhere to hide or to be so alone that no one can find you.

I stepped inside. It smelled like cleaning fluid and salt: sanitized tears. Not mine, I thought. "You

There is no one around in any direction as far as I can see, and there is so much peace in that , in the absence of human voices. Sometimes is seems like everybody wants to put their noise into the world until you can't have enough quiet to even know you exist.

The sun is ours. The Atlantic breaks. And we ride it, we ride it, we ride it.