Mena > Mena's Quotes

“It's as if he can no longer acknowledge the love he felt or the pain I am in. I have been dismissed. I don't think I was smarter or as beautiful as the other girls he did this to. It's just that I was me. It was all I had.”
― Emma Forrest, Your Voice in My Head

“When he kisses me, I cry. I explain it's not because I wish he were someone else, it's because it's such a shock to the system to be desired after feeling so completely abandoned.”
― Emma Forrest, Your Voice in My Head

“I say, "Well then I don't know if it was real,
and that makes me feel like I'm going insane again."
"Absolutely it was real. It was a real, partial picture. Because it ended preemptively, things you would have learned about him in the relationship, you are instead learning in the breakup. You have learned that he has a desperate desire for intimacy
and then a desperate desire for the cave.
He will get lonely there eventually and come back."
"To me?"
He doesn't pause. "To someone new."
"And I'll have to watch another girl?"
"You will have to, but you will also know
what lies ahead for that poor girl.”
― Emma Forrest, Your Voice in My Head

“Now that he's gone, I feel like I'm a senior citizen who gave away her life savings over the phone.
And this is the crux: I never in my life believed in someone as much as I believed in him.
The shame is overwhelming.”
― Emma Forrest, Your Voice in My Head

“It is madness. And if you don't know who you are, or if your real self has drifted away from you with the undertow, madness at least gives you an identity. It's the same with self-loathing. You're probably just normal and normal-looking but that's not a real identity, not the way ugliness is. Normality, just accepting that you're probably normal-looking, lacks the force field of self-disgust. If you don't know who you are, madness gives you something to believe in.”
― Emma Forrest, Your Voice in My Head

“No one ever loved you like him.
And no one ever took it away so completely.
But it's here.
Look around.”
― Emma Forrest, Your Voice in My Head

“It's the kind of spring day that warns you that a hot summer is coming. It forces you to feel your body: the way your sweat runs down your hairline and your thighs stick to every seat. It's one of those days when you look at perfectly un-sweaty people wearing blue jeans and wonder where their glands are. You are painfully aware that you are thirsty and gross.”
― Katie Yee

“The enemy of a love is never outside, it's not a man or a woman, it's what we lack in ourselves.”
― Anaïs Nin, A Spy in the House of Love

“At night too, she puzzled the mystery of her desperate need of kindness. As other girls prayed for handsomeness in a lover, or for wealth, or for power, or for poetry, she had prayed fervently: let him be kind.”
― Anaïs Nin, A Spy in the House of Love

“I prefer empty cages, Sabina, until I find a unique bird I once saw in my dreams.”
― Anaïs Nin, A Spy in the House of Love

“I believe that in judging our actions we are more severe than professional judges. We judge not only our actions, but our thoughts, our intentions, our secret curses, our hidden hate.”
― Anaïs Nin, A Spy in the House of Love

“You haven't loved yet," he said. "You've only been trying to love; beginning to love. Trust alone is not love, illusion is not love, desire alone is not love. All these were paths leading you out of yourself, it is true, and so you thought they led to another, but you never reached the other. You were only on the way.”
― Anaïs Nin, A Spy in the House of Love

“There is no bleaker moment in life of the city than that one which crosses the boundary lines between those who have not slept all night and those who are going to work. It was for Sabina as if two races of men and women lived on earth, the night people and the day people, never meeting face to face except at this moment.”
― Anaïs Nin, A Spy in the House of Love

“What I corrupted was what is called the truth in favour of a more marvelous world. I could always improve on the facts.
[...] in self-defense, I accuse the writers of fairy-tales. Not hunger, not cruelty, not my parents, but these tales which promised that sleeping in the snow never caused pneumonia, that bread never turned stale, that trees blossomed out of season, that dragons could be killed with courage, that intense wishing would be followed immediately by fulfillment of the wish. Intrepid wishing, said the fairytales, was more effective than labor. The smoke issuing from Aladdin's lamp was my first smokescreen, and the lies learned from fairytales were my first perjuries. Let us say I had perverted tendencies: I believed everything I read.”
― Anaïs Nin, A Spy in the House of Love

“Later he´ll be drunk in extremis and will only be able to speak the esperanto of alcoholics, which is a language full of stutterings from the geological layers of our animal ancestors”
― Anaïs Nin, A Spy in the House of Love