Anna DeForest > Quotes

“How did that first life, that childhood, end? Hard to say how, and hard to say when. But I can tell you how I got out of town. Every book I read said you had to go to the city to see what the world really was. I applied to one college and I got in. In that interstitium, when I knew I was leaving but hadn’t yet gone, I felt for sure that I would die,”
― Anna DeForest, A History of Present Illness: A Novel

“I don’t know what it means to suffer. I try to feel it out. When someone is dying and then they die, what hits you first is relief, permissiveness, a broad calm for a moment: a world without end. Then some deaths just grab you by the throat, remind you of the balance of the game. Remember looking in the mirror as a child and saying your name? This face, you’d think, these hands. This house on cabbage night, jumping from the roof of the shed. The bravery of it all, the obvious importance of it. But this is how it ends, always: surrounded by strangers.”
― Anna DeForest

“It is normal from what I have read to have feelings for your cadaver, though only students who are women ever seem to admit this.”
― Anna DeForest

“I grew up in a ruined generation. The problem they said was that everyone got a prize. It was also a time of running lockdown drills in schools for when some loner came to kill us.”
― Anna DeForest

“We don’t do things because of what we believe in, but we do come to believe in what we are doing.”
― Anna DeForest

“When my great loss comes, I hope I scream like his wife and fall to the floor, not keep still and silent as my heart explodes in my chest.”
― Anna DeForest

“Don’t settle on the smallest story you can live with. We all hurt, hurt in the bones, have hurt for each other since the day we were born. Best not to blame our mothers for it.”
― Anna DeForest

“It is normal from what I have read to have some feeling for your cadaver, though only the students who are women ever seemed to admit this.”
― Anna DeForest

“In psychiatry, for example, hallucination is perception without an object, while illusion is true perception interpreted incorrectly.”
― Anna DeForest

“The obvious, a poet said, is difficult to prove. The hard part is that I want to tell the truth. Meaning what exactly? As academics, we are schooled in taking a history, not giving our own. We are taught to reach for open-ended questions. For example, you don’t ask someone if she drinks; you say, how much do you drink of the average day.”
― Anna DeForest

“I have a lot of things I have lost. It barely bothers me now. I can pull my heart out over work and then go home to nothing. I sleep like dead now. There are things, of course, that could be better.”
― Anna DeForest

“This fascination with disaster, both fear and fetish, I never quite outgrew. The truth is, you start to sort of wish for it. Like some Czech said: Vertigo is something other than the fear of falling. Half the rush is wanting it. Wanting to get it over with.”
― Anna DeForest, A History of Present Illness: A Novel

“It doesn't matter just because it happened.”
― Anna DeForest, A History of Present Illness

“She did not have the teeth of someone who was raised poor, but why else would one join the military?”
― Anna DeForest

“Reverence is almost certainly wrongheaded, but I have never believed in suicide as moral failure.”
― Anna DeForest

“Depression is a mood disorder, something wrong with how you think and feel. Borderline is a personality disorder; something wrong with who you are.”
― Anna DeForest

“Few things for some people are only in theory.”
― Anna DeForest

“This place has been a miracle land. No one even dies until we let them.”
― Anna DeForest