Mailhot Hydraulique Quotes

Nobody wants to know why Indian women leave or where they go. Our bodies walk across the highway from the dances of our youth into missing narratives without strobe lights or sweet drinks in our small purses, or the talk of leaving. The truth of our leaving or coming into the world is never told. ~ Terese Marie Mailhot

I was not right to want to die. I didn't want to leave my family. I liked my mind and its potential. I knew the type of burden I was. I was like my mother. ~ Terese Marie Mailhot

I can't believe my reserve of water - from my nose and eyes. I have dormant fluid in my body, every woman does. I don't know if I am a cavern or a river. Once, you said I was a geyser: a hole in the ground - bursting. ~ Terese Marie Mailhot

My story was maltreated. The words were too wrong and ugly to speak. I tried to tell someone my story, but he thought it was a hustle. ~ Terese Marie Mailhot

You are such a home to me. ~ Terese Marie Mailhot

I'm a river widened by misery, and the potency of my language is more than human. ~ Terese Marie Mailhot

I preferred abandoned over forsaken - and estranged to abandoned. I loved with abandon. It's something I still take with me. Estranged is a word with a focus on absence. I can't afford to think of lack - I'd rather be liberated by it. ~ Terese Marie Mailhot

The way being healed is never real unless every moment of every day you remind yourself of your progress and remind yourself not to go back, or hurt someone, or do the wrong thing - it's not healing unless you keep moving - you're never done. ~ Terese Marie Mailhot

Each child, woman, and man should know a limit of containment. Nobody should be asked to hold more. ~ Terese Marie Mailhot

How could misfortune follow me so well, and why did I choose it every time? ~ Terese Marie Mailhot

In white culture, forgiveness is synonymous with letting go. In my culture, I believe we carry pain until we can reconcile with it through ceremony. Pain is not framed like a problem with a solution. I don't even know that white people see transcendence the way we do. I'm not sure that their dichotomies apply to me. ~ Terese Marie Mailhot

I can hear my aunt's voice, telling me that if my security depends on a man's words or action, I've lost sight of my power. ~ Terese Marie Mailhot

I'm trying not to be an asshole,' you say.
Sometimes trying to be the absence of something makes you that very thing. ~ Terese Marie Mailhot

I woke up as the bones of my ancestors locked in government storage. ~ Terese Marie Mailhot

My people cultivated pain. In a way that god cultivated his garden with the foresight that he could not contain or protect the life within it. Humanity was born out of pain. ~ Terese Marie Mailhot

Nothing is too ugly for this world, I think. It's just that people pretend not to see. ~ Terese Marie Mailhot

When you told me that I want too much, I considered how much you take. ~ Terese Marie Mailhot

You've said before that I'm mercurial. I don't know. Pain feels faster than light. I react to pain, and there's too much of it. ~ Terese Marie Mailhot

I realized that love can be mediocre and a safe comfort, or it can be unhinged and hurtful. Either seemed like a good life. ~ Terese Marie Mailhot

Sometimes I know part of me is still a ghost, walking next to my mother, looking for something to make an offering to, holding her hand. Either this feeling means that part of me is dead, or that she's alive, somewhere inside of me. ~ Terese Marie Mailhot

I wondered if he thought this was a real emergency or another dramatic thing - I am constantly in some panic or despair, it seems. I worried more than I could breathe.

Mailhot, Terese Marie. Heart Berries: A Memoir (p. 106). Counterpoint. Kindle Edition. ~ Terese Marie Mailhot

What do you even want with my sorrow? You are so inefficient with pain - I realized you never had to cultivate it the way I did. The way Indian women do.
You think weakness is a problem. I want to be torn apart by everything. ~ Terese Marie Mailhot

Because of my medication, I didn't cry over breakfast or minor transgressions. You believed me when I said the past was my fault. I believed me. ~ Terese Marie Mailhot

You tell me that my pain feels searing and that I'm missing four layers of skin. Your pain is an empty room. I agree. ~ Terese Marie Mailhot

Today, in front of a slew of white authors, during a fellowship, with a drink in my hand, I said that I was untouchable. There was a gasp, and maybe it was a hundred years of work for my name to arrive here, where I can name my pain so well that people are afraid of the consequences and the power. ~ Terese Marie Mailhot

Romanticism requires bravery and risk. ~ Terese Marie Mailhot