Chloé Caldwell > Chloé's Quotes

“Things hurt worse before they hurt better.”
― Chloe Caldwell, Women

“Why does tragedy exist? Because you are full of rage. Why are you full of rage? Because you are full of grief.”
― Anne Carson (Translator), Grief Lessons: Four Plays by Euripides

“If I could go back, I'd coach myself. I'd be the woman who taught me how to stand up, how to want things, how to ask for them. I'd be the woman who says, your mind, your imagination, they are everything. Look how beautiful. You deserve to sit at the table. The radiance falls on all of us.”
― Lidia Yuknavitch, The Chronology of Water

“When a woman tells the truth she is creating the possibility for more truth around her.”
― Adrienne Rich

“My dad is dead. And as I type this, by the window, on the rainy day, I am alive, yes. I am living. But sometimes it doesn't feel like I am doing it fast enough, or hard enough, or all the way. And it is times like that when I can understand wanting a cigarette in my hand, then my mouth, then my hand again. Holding the cigarette. Tending to the cigarette. Giving the cigarette what it needs. Tapping it in the ashtray. Sucking on it.

Then flicking it in the street, like it meant nothing to me.”
― Amy Fusselman

“boundaries, Sheila. Barriers. We need them. They let you love someone. Otherwise you might kill them.”
― Sheila Heti, How Should a Person Be?

“Out of the sad sack of sad shit that was my life, I made a wordhouse.”
― Lidia Yuknavitch, The Chronology of Water

“In water, like in books—you can leave your life.”
― Lidia Yuknavitch, The Chronology of Water

“Your life doesn’t happen in any kind of order. Events don’t have cause and effect relationships the way you wish they did. It’s all a series of fragments and repetitions and pattern formations. Language and water have this in common.”
― Lidia Yuknavitch, The Chronology of Water