Elaina > Elaina's Quotes

“Old pictures look very rugged and young, and the people in the photographs always seem a lot happier than you are.”
― Stephen Chbosky, The Perks of Being a Wallflower

“Dear Friend,
I'm sorry I haven't written to you in a couple of weeks, but I have been trying to 'participate' like Bill said.”
― Stephen Chbosky, The Perks of Being a Wallflower

“It is so hard to leave—until you leave. And then it is the easiest goddamned thing in the world.”
― John Green, Paper Towns

“A paper town for a paper girl.”
― John Green , Paper Towns

“To be trusted is a greater compliment than to be loved.”
― George MacDonald

“If you have heard a Jewish cantor sing, if he has touched you and made your own sorrow seem trivial when compared with his, you will know my feeling when I follow the curves of her profile, like mobile rivers, to their common delta.”
― Jean Toomer, Cane

“Men are apt to idolize or fear that which they cannot understand, especially if it be a woman.”
― Jean Toomer, Cane

“Night winds in Georgia are vagrant poets, whispering.”
― Jean Toomer, Cane

“Eventually something you love is going to be taken away. And then you will fall to the floor crying. And then, however much later, it is finally happening to you: you’re falling to the floor crying thinking, “I am falling to the floor crying,” but there’s an element of the ridiculous to it — you knew it would happen and, even worse, while you’re on the floor crying you look at the place where the wall meets the floor and you realize you didn’t paint it very well.”
― Richard Siken

“You’re in a car with a beautiful boy, and he won’t tell you that he loves you, but he loves you. And you feel like you’ve done something terrible, like robbed a liquor store, or swallowed pills, or shoveled yourself a grave in the dirt, and you’re tired. You’re in a car with a beautiful boy, and you’re trying not to tell him that you love him, and you’re trying to choke down the feeling, and you’re trembling, but he reaches over and he touches you, like a prayer for which no words exist, and you feel your heart taking root in your body, like you’ve discovered something you didn’t even have a name for.”
― richard siken

“Tell me how all this, and love too, will ruin us.
These, our bodies, possessed by light.
Tell me we'll never get used to it.”
― Richard Siken, Crush

“I'm battling monsters, I'm pulling you out of the burning buildings/ and you say I'll give you anything but you never come through.”
― Richard Siken, Crush

“The way you slam your body into mine reminds me I’m alive, but monsters are always hungry, darling, and they’re only a few steps behind you, finding the flaw, the poor weld, the place where we weren’t stitched up quite right, the place they could almost slip right into through if the skin wasn’t trying to keep them out, to keep them here, on the other side of the theater where the curtain keeps rising. I crawled out the window and ran into the woods. I had to make up all the words myself. The way they taste, the way they sound in the air. I passed through the narrow gate, stumbled in, stumbled around for a while, and stumbled back out. I made this place for you. A place for to love me. If this isn’t a kingdom then I don’t know what is.”
― Richard Siken, Crush

“I’ve been rereading your story. I think it’s about me in a way that might not be flattering, but that’s okay. We dream and dream of being seen as we really are and then finally someone looks at us and sees us truly and we fail to measure up. Anyway: story received, story included. You looked at me long enough to see something mysterioso under all the gruff and bluster. Thanks. Sometimes you get so close to someone you end up on the other side of them.”
― Richard Siken

“I sleep. I dream. I make up things that I would never say. I say them very quietly.”
― Richard Siken

“If you love me, Henry, you don’t love me in a way I understand.”
― Richard Siken, Crush

“I woke up in the morning and I didn’t want anything, didn’t do anything, couldn’t do it anyway, just lay there listening to the blood rush
through me and it never made any sense, anything.”
― Richard Siken

“Moonlight making crosses
on your body, and me putting my mouth on every one.”
― Richard Siken, Crush

“How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world.”
― Anne Frank, Anne Frank's Tales from the Secret Annex: A Collection of Her Short Stories, Fables, and Lesser-Known Writings

“Some friends don't understand this. They don't understand how desperate I am to have someone say, I love you and I support you just the way you are because you're wonderful just the way you are. They don't understand that I can't remember anyone ever saying that to me. I am so demanding and difficult for my friends because I want to crumble and fall apart before them so that they will love me even though I am no fun, lying in bed, crying all the time, not moving. Depression is all about If you loved me you would.”
― Elizabeth Wurtzel, Prozac Nation

“I was so scared to give up depression, fearing that somehow the worst part of me was actually all of me. ”
― Elizabeth Wurtzel, Prozac Nation

“We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night

“Things get bad for all of us, almost continually, and what we do under the constant stress reveals who/what we are.”
― Charles Bukowski, What Matters Most is How Well You Walk Through the Fire

“Others imply that they know what it is like to be depressed because they have gone through a divorce, lost a job, or broken up with someone. But these experiences carry with them feelings. Depression, instead, is flat, hollow, and unendurable. It is also tiresome. People cannot abide being around you when you are depressed. They might think that they ought to, and they might even try, but you know and they know that you are tedious beyond belief: you are irritable and paranoid and humorless and lifeless and critical and demanding and no reassurance is ever enough. You're frightened, and you're frightening, and you're "not at all like yourself but will be soon," but you know you won't.”
― Kay Redfield Jamison, An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness

“If I can't feel, if I can't move, if I can't think, and I can't care, then what conceivable point is there in living?”
― Kay Redfield Jamison, An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness

“I am tired of hiding, tired of misspent and knotted energies, tired of the hypocrisy, and tired of acting as though I have something to hide.”
― Kay Redfield Jamison, An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness

“Mother, who has an absolute belief that it is not the cards that one is dealt in life, it is how one plays them, is, by far, the highest card I was dealt.”
― Kay Redfield Jamison, An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness

“Love, like life, is much stranger and far more complicated than one is brought up to believe.”
― Kay Redfield Jamison, An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness

“I look back over my shoulder and feel the presence of an intense young girl and then a volatile and disturbed young woman, both with high dreams and restless, romantic aspirations”
― Kay Redfield Jamison, An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness

“Depression is awful beyond words or sounds or images...it bleeds relationships through suspicion, lack of confidence and self-respect, the inability to enjoy life, to walk or talk or think normally, the exhaustion, the night terrors, the day terrors. There is nothing good to be said for it except that it gives you the experience of how it must be to be old, to be old and sick, to be dying; to be slow of mind; to be lacking in grace, polish and coordination; to be ugly; to have no belief in the possibilities of life, the pleasures of sex, the exquisiteness of music or the ability to make yourself and others laugh.”
― Kay Redfield Jamison, An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness