Kathleen Glasgow Quotes

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. ~ Kathleen Glasgow

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. ~ Kathleen Glasgow

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. ~ Kathleen Glasgow

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

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. ~ Kathleen Glasgow

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

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. ~ Kathleen Glasgow

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. ~ Kathleen Glasgow

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

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. ~ Kathleen Glasgow

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. ~ Kathleen Glasgow

This whole place is a world of sobbing girls. ~ Kathleen Glasgow

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. ~ Kathleen Glasgow

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? ~ Kathleen Glasgow

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? ~ Kathleen Glasgow

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

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

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

defiant, and her words have rough, girlish hope. The ~ Kathleen Glasgow

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

I'm no stranger to fucking up. ~ Kathleen Glasgow

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

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? ~ Kathleen Glasgow

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

Girl slips on headphones. World gone. ~ Kathleen Glasgow

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

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

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. ~ Kathleen Glasgow

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. ~ Kathleen Glasgow

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. ~ Kathleen Glasgow

+"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. ~ Kathleen Glasgow

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. ~ Kathleen Glasgow

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

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

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

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. ~ Kathleen Glasgow

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

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. ~ Kathleen Glasgow

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

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

Who Knew I'd Make Her So Blue. ~ Kathleen Glasgow

[...] 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. ~ Kathleen Glasgow

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

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 ~ Kathleen Glasgow

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. ~ Kathleen Glasgow

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. ~ Kathleen Glasgow

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. ~ Kathleen Glasgow

There are so many people who are never coming back. ~ Kathleen Glasgow

Go be absolutely, positively, fucking angelic. ~ Kathleen Glasgow

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

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 ~ Kathleen Glasgow

[...] 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. ~ Kathleen Glasgow

... 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. ~ Kathleen Glasgow

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. ~ Kathleen Glasgow

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

I was not a believer in things just changing. One had to try to change them. ~ Kathleen Rooney

Insolent youth rides, now, in the whirlwind. For those modern iconoclasts who are without culture possess, apparently, all the courage. ~ Ellen Glasgow

In general, though, women aren't really allowed to be kick-ass. It's like the famous distinction between art and craft: Art, and wildness, and pushing against the edges, is a male thing. Craft, and control, and polish, is for women. Culturally we don't allow women to be as free as they would like, because that is frightening. We either shun those women or deem them crazy. Female singers who push too much, and too hard, don't tend to last very long. They're jags, bolts, comets: Janis Joplin, Billie Holiday. But being that woman who pushes the boundaries means you also bring in less desirable aspects of yourself. At the end of the day, women are expected to hold up the world, not annihilate it. That's why Kathleen Hanna of Bikini Kill is so great. The term girl power was coined by the Riot Grrl movement that Kathleen spearheaded in the 1990s. Girl power: a phrase that would later be co-opted by the Spice Girls, a group put together by men, each Spice Girl branded with a different personality, polished and stylized to be made marketable as a faux female type. Coco was one of the few girls on the playground who had never heard of them, and that's its own form of girl power, saying no to female marketing! ~ Kim Gordon

It had seemed entirely sensible at the time. A simple way to test the truth of her claim that she had lain with de Villiers. To show her that lying to him was useless. To make a point.
Instead, he had ignited a desire that burned him like none he had ever felt before.
He had expected Lady Laurien d'Amboise to be a timid little convent mouse. Quiet and passive and pliant. Easily manageable. Instead she was outspoken and strong-willed...and stunning in a way he could not even describe.
An innocent beauty caught up in a deadly game that was none of her making....
Malcolm rose to leave, chuckling.
"And what is there to laugh about?"
Darach gave his jovial friend a dour look.
Malcolm stopped just long enough to do his best imitation of Darach. "'Simple. Kidnap one French lass, hold her for a fortnight, and return her to de Villiers after he meets our demands. Perfectly simple. ~ Shelly Thacker

I have no intention of disowning my record as a member of the McGuinty government. ~ Kathleen Wynne

Being fired from a show - being fired in any way, in any instance, any business - is just hard. ~ Kathleen Rose Perkins

I didn't even know what the word lesbian meant until I was called one ... and then I had to look it up in the dictionary. ~ Kathleen Hanna

Fragrance is an aspiration. A goal. Not just a tool of seduction but of power and status. ~ Kathleen Tessaro

No, one couldn't make a revolution, one couldn't even start a riot, with sheep that asked only for better browsing. ~ Ellen Glasgow

Just because you're wearing a goofy hat doesn't make it performance art. ~ Kathleen Hanna

A few years ago, if you had told me I'd be moving back to Glasgow I'd have said, 'No way'. But it's changed. It's much more vibrant, bohemian. But I'm 35 and I've become a bit of a homebody, I don't really go out much. Same in New York. My home could be anywhere but I love Glasgow. ~ Kelly Macdonald

I always give homeless people money, and my friends yell at me, 'He's only going to buy more alcohol and cigarettes.' And I'm thinking, 'Oh, like I wasn't?' ~ Kathleen Madigan

Here we discover the paradox of the contemplative life, that the desert of solitude can be the school where we learn to love others. ~ Kathleen Norris

General Motors spends more on health care than steel. ~ Kathleen Sebelius

A young woman on the cusp of her sexual awakening is a powerful creature.' She ~ Kathleen Tessaro

I've always thought that "punk" wasn't really a genre. My band started in Olympia where K Records was and K Records put out music that didn't sound super loud and aggressive. And yet they were punk because they were creating culture in their own community instead of taking their cue from MTV about what was real music and what was cool. It wasn't about a certain fashion. It was about your ideology, it was about creating a community and doing it on your own and not having to rely on, kinda, "The Man" to brand you and say that you were okay. ~ Kathleen Hanna

My values, our values, aren't about pointing fingers. They are about offering a helping hand. ~ Kathleen Blanco

To eat in a monastery refectory is an exercise in humility; daily, one is reminded to put communal necessity before individual preference. While consumer culture speaks only to preferences, treating even whims as needs to be granted (and the sooner the better), monastics sense that this pandering to delusions of self-importance weakens the true self, and diminishes our ability to distinguish desires from needs. It's a price they're not willing to pay. ~ Kathleen Norris

I picked up a small square shortbread biscuit and stared at it, noting the uneven angles, wishing it were a perfect square, but it was, after all, merely a baked good, and baked goods did not ordinarily form perfect squares. ~ Kathleen Baldwin

There is no state of satisfaction, because to himself no man is a success. ~ Ellen Glasgow

John Galt was closer to the genial side of Scott, if with a narrower focus in the material he chose to write about - but for all that giving us, in thin disguise, real places and real changes in a real nation. He dealt above all with the West of Scotland, and was indeed a patriot of the region. It irked him that Edinburgh had won the epithet of Athens of the North and tried to create a fashion for calling Glasgow the Venice of the North; somehow this never caught on. ~ Michael Fry

Adoption is a wonderful way of becoming a family. If being a biological parent is any better or more rewarding than being an adoptive parent, I really don't think I could stand it! ~ Kathleen Silber

I liked human beings, but I did not love human nature. ~ Ellen Glasgow

followed her and, ~ Kathleen E. Woodiwiss

The only sweeter than union is reunion. ~ Kathleen McGowan

Point of view is everything. ~ Kathleen Winter

To communicate is truly a gift. It is a wondrous ability of your amazing human body, the ability that allows us to connect with other humans to give meaning to our lives. I will argue that it is what makes us human. ~ Kathleen Depperschmidt

I watch videos on YouTube of bands that I've heard of that I want to check out. And sometimes I don't even finish the video. And that's really sad, because maybe I'd like that song. I think that we don't give stuff a chance to really sink in. ~ Kathleen Hanna

In Scotland, I have to say I'm more fond of Glasgow Rangers - not celtc - and there is a great player who played for them, who is still alive today, Willie Henderson. I met up with him recently when Benfica played celtc again. ~ Eusebio

A hug makes you feel good all day. ~ Kathleen Keating

I really love that I'm giving myself the opportunity finally to not have the pressure of every single song you do having to be "political" or whatever. I'm just making what I wanna make. ~ Kathleen Hanna

I am not entirely persuaded that selling a book is like selling a pig. ~ Kathleen A. Flynn

Evidently, whatever else marriage might prevent, it was not a remedy for isolation of spirit. ~ Ellen Glasgow

It never occurred to me that I couldn't change things that needed changing or couldn't have what I wanted if I worked hard enough and was good enough. ~ Kathleen Turner

In the silence of fragrance, Eva saw how ambiguous, complex stories could be told. Shifting and mutating, they blossomed, bloomed and faded; their very impermanence was incredibly moving to her. You could be laughing in public yet wear, right on the surface of your skin, a perfume ripe with longing, dripping with regret, shining with hope, all at the same time. It would fade as the day faded, vanishing into gossamer on your skin. And still it had the power to catch you unaware, piercing right through you, when you hung your dress up that night. ~ Kathleen Tessaro

True goodness is an inward grace, not an outward necessity. ~ Ellen Glasgow