Maria Dahvana Headley Quotes

Like we're here, and at the same time, in outer space. Which of course, we are. We're all untethered, all flying around in the dark, the same as Mars and Venus, the same as the stars.

We're commuter wives. These are our commuter lives. We're capable of carrying alcoholic husbands from the kitchen to the bathroom in a fireman's grip. Between trains, we train to fight with enemies we haven't met yet, battling against punching bags, leaping like the world is made of stone walls and we're storming them.
There's another version of commuting of course, as in to commute a sentence.
This is our sentence, these suburbs, the train that does not stretch to meet them

Wonders have been born before. Sometimes they've been worshipped. There've been new things over and over, and some creatures have fallen groaning to the ground and others have learned to fly.

Instead of the smoldering, soul-baring, Abelard-to-Heloise-sans-castration solicitations you rightfully deserve, you're getting stupefying lines like: I'm listening to NPR. Do you want to come over and make out?

Cash register. Army surplus, my son wrapped up in my coat. He was just a baby then. I thought I might be up here on this mountain for no reason. Maybe everything I thought was wrong in the world wasn't wrong at all, Maybe he'd be safe here. Maybe I wasn't just every mother ever, panicked, looking at her child and seeing all the ways he might get hurt. He was mine, and I wanted someone to tell me my son was beautiful, to tell me he'd grow into a man. I didn't wan't to be alone forever, with no one to help me, and no one but me to help him.

The world isn't large enough for heroes and monsters at once. There's too much danger of confusion between the two categories.

Some days I'm just sixteen, and sixteen isn't what I want to be.

all most people wish for is more, wishing forever until tongues are parched and hearts are tired of beating. Love is a kind of wish. Wishing for love is the same as wishing for more wishes.

My first tattoo is a full-on Sailor Jerry situation on my hip - it's a swallow with big spread wings. When I got it I was 20 on St. Mark's Place in New York; I just walked in in a frenzy. It's still there 17 years later and it's not a terrible thing to look at.

Once upon a time, he was the child of some other mother, and his beloved was a wonder of the world.

Looping. Some days are so dark I can't see anything but a miserable fog of number after number, word after word, clouds of verbs and nouns and none of them the ones that will make time go backward.

Maybe every monster is a miracle meant to change the world.

Dogs can tell how many times a person's heart beats, how many breaths they've taken, whether they're sick, whether they're dying. Dogs can find the secrets their people don't know, tip them over, spill them onto the ground, roll in them

Willa maintains a vigil. Certain tasks are relegated to women. Mourning, staring into the wastes, waiting for no one to surface.

It's a white man who's missing. Usually, that would be enough to keep it in the news, but eight days in, the police release their grief in an official report. The art of blame-casting is a lesser sorcery. History is written in sand, and a broom changes everything. Every woman knows the art of covering up a mess: a carpet, a dustpan, bleach on the boards. What do you do with the cleaning supplies of the world? Use them to wash the blood away, and grind the bones into bread. Swallow the confessions whispered in bed.

If events don't make sense, a story grows to cover up the confusion. Motives and mistakes.

Did he just say stormsharks? My inner nerd is elated. Can anything I will ever hear from now until the end of time sound cooler than stormsharks?

They'll never forgive me, except they love me, so they will.

I know everyone has dreams of flying, but this isn't a dream of flying. It's a dream of floating, and the ocean is not water but wind.
I call it a dream, but it feels realer than my life.

If you look at the sky that way, it's this massive shifting poem, or maybe a letter, first written by one author, and then, when the earth moves, annotated by another. So I stare and stare until, one day, I can read it.

Adults want to talk about death way less than people my age do. Death is the Santa Claus of the adult world. Except Santa Claus in reverse. The guy who takes all the presents away. Big bag over the shoulder, climbing up the chimney carrying everything in a person's life, and taking off, eight-reindeered, from the roof.

I think about curses and pirates. Skeletons guarding booby-trapped hideaways.

I {} you more than [[[{{{}}}]]].

I think of the note.

I want to say me too.

I want to say I know.

I want to say I can read the gaps in your sentences. I can read the space between your letters. I know your language. It's my language too.

I want to say that.

I read stuff. Books are not my only friends, but we're friendly. So there.

I don't think of the sky as any kind of heaven item. I think of it as a bunch of gases and faraway echoes of things that used to be on fire.

But there was no version of my life in which I wasn't getting my ass to Svalbard.

Vertigo, that's where I am. Pi wants to take over, but I don't let it. Looping wants to occur, but I remain sentient, and I don't do any of the various forms of out-freaking I want to do.

Because every time someone finds a new animal, or a new amazing thing on earth, it means we haven't broken everything yet.

Brooke Berman's voice is utterly distinct, and her book, detailing her nomadic artist's journey toward both a successful playwriting career and a home of her own, through 20 years of cramped sublets, high-rise palaces, writer's colonies, and boyfriend's vans, is a hilarious, hopeful, and penetrating must-read.

We are made of awkward.

Even people who've never seen a miracle can believe in miracles.

You hold no horrors for me

I need to get onto Aza's ship. I know where it's going. I think I know, even though all I really know, all I've really known since I was five, is that Aza is my universe.

Listen,' someone whispers into my ear. 'Listen to me.'
Am I dead?
'Listen,' the voice whispers. 'In some countries, you kill a monster when it's born. Other places, you kill it only when it kills someone else. Other places, you let it go, out into the forest or the sea, and it lives there forever, calling for others of its kind. Listen to me, it cries. Maybe it's just alone.

People, alas, don't document things with any kind of precision. They fill Twitter with blurry photos.

I can't imagine a universe in which I try to unlove her.

Is this what love is? That you can see each other, even in the dark?

Nothing like trouble to make a day pass faster.

Every life starts with the same beginning and ends with the same end. The rest is the story, even if you don't understand it, even if you aren't sure which parts are true and which parts are your brain trying to make sense out of smoke.

Children are better at feeding monsters than adults are. They don't have the burden of suspicion.

I'm a hoax, a dying boy who's grown wings.

And there's the loudest sound I've ever heard and the brightest white I've ever seen, and I'm made of it, I'm-
I'm made of light
I'm made of heat
And I'm flying

I was a protestor. I was such a protestor that I regularly protested things that might have been good for me.

Why is she here at Herot Hall, where at any second something bad could come down the mountain, or tunnel up from below? Monsters. There's a whole world filled with monsters. They everywhere

I'm this thing that emerged from it, some kind of miserable Phoenix.

No one needs to see us for us to exist. No one needs to love us for us to exist. The sky is filled with light.

The world is full of wonders.

But who's ever safe? Down below us are the kind of people who walk armed into churches and movie theaters and through libraries, blast fevers into federal buildings, and build bombs out of things they bought cheap at a hardware store. What kind of myth is it, that people like them are keeping the rest of us safe?

There's more than one path to immortality.

People never think, until it happens to their place, that all construction is destruction. The whole planet is paved in the dead, who are ignored so the living can dig their foundations.

You are strong enough to sing as you wish, not as your pain has forced to. You aren't your hurt. You're other than that. You are not the broken things you've been.

It's water from beneath the mountain, and its full of of the taste of bones and rocks. She's bought five cases of bottled to keep from having to serve this, even in ice-cube format. There's something awful about it. It feels full of ghosts

I'm dark matter. The universe inside of me is full of something, and science can't even shine a light on it. I feel like I'm mostly made of mysteries.

I think about celestial junk. Like, maybe every planet in this solar system is discarded by giant hands. Each star a crumpled ball of paper, a love letter lit on fire, a smoldering bit of cigarette ash.

Maybe love is just that, and only that. The choice you make. And so, you choose to love. You choose to give it all up, to surrender your scared self and live in this mystery. Jik

I frantically opened my address book and searched it for someone, anyone, who'd moved me, who'd been good in both bed and brain. No. A slew of the so-so.

I was becoming convinced that I was going to be lonely for the rest of my life. It wasn't that I wasn't meeting men. I was. It was just that they all drove me crazy.