Syncuvane > Syncuvane's Quotes

“I don’t want to be another name on the list of angry women in our family.”
― Trista Mateer, When the Stars Wrote Back

“I am older than the poets and I am older than the pens. I am older than the stars and the ocean I crawled out of.”
― Trista Mateer, Aphrodite Made Me Do It

“I wanted to taste the salt on your skin, to press my mouth against the violent curve of you.”
― Trista Mateer, The Dogs I Have Kissed

“I am always two parts tequila, one part longing.”
― Trista Mateer, The Dogs I Have Kissed

“Don’t you ever let another human being tear you apart. Remember that you have claws and teeth, too.”
― Trista Mateer, The Dogs I Have Kissed

“Your abuser's past does not absolve them of their abuse. Their depression does not absolve them of their abuse. Your relationship with them does not absolve them of their abuse. How long you've known them does not absolve them of their abuse. Your love for them does not absolve them of their abuse.”
― Trista Mateer, Aphrodite Made Me Do It

“love has little to do with blood relations and more to do with who you choose to bleed for”
― Trista Mateer, Aphrodite Made Me Do It

“When I stop getting tripped up by your crooked heart and your small hands, I will want to go over all of your poems with white out. I will want to rinse your name out of my mouth, snuff out all the evidence that I thought the sun and moon of you because the world was not enough.”
― Trista Mateer, Honeybee

“pick you apart like puzzle pieces, stick my fingers in your cracks and split you open to see the inside because I am so damn naive that I am always expecting a sweet, soft center even when there’s none to be had. You did not want to be smashed open and dived greedily into. You pressed your mouth to my fingers and toes, wrote prose into my palms where every other line began with “No” and ended with a reason that you could not bear to stay.”
― Trista Mateer, Honeybee

“Then there is also this: How do you give up something that’s nestled in your marrow, this particular taste in loving, one that is crisscrossed with hate, with specks of long-ago humiliations endured but never forgotten? What I’m referring to is an appetite for a certain degree of debasement, being reduced to a panting, abject creature in the name of sexual pleasure. The fine-tuning of relative power that naturally obtains between couples pitched way up into the insistent blare of one who dominates and one who submits.”
― Daphne Merkin, 22 Minutes of Unconditional Love

“I feel less and less up to the requirements of my life,”
― Daphne Merkin, This Close to Happy: A Reckoning with Depression

“It was one thing to be depressed in your twenties or thirties, when the aspect of youth gave it an undeniable poignancy, a certain tattered charm; it was another thing entirely to be depressed in middle age, when you were supposed to have come to terms with life’s failings, as well as your own.”
― Daphne Merkin, This Close to Happy: A Reckoning with Depression

“You see, down here, where life hangs heavy like a suffocating cloak, I can’t remember that I’ve ever felt any other way. I need to be reminded that there are reasons in the world to hold on, even if I have forgotten them; I tell myself if I can just hold on I will remember them, these reasons, they will come back to me.”
― Daphne Merkin, This Close to Happy: A Reckoning with Depression

“Despair is always described as dull, when the truth is that despair has a light all its own, a lunar glow, the color of mottled silver.”
― Daphne Merkin, This Close to Happy: A Reckoning with Depression

“I also recognize, however, that you can talk yourself blue in the face in a therapist’s office about crucial failures of love or nurturance with little effect on the inner blackness you carry around with you.”
― Daphne Merkin, This Close to Happy: A Reckoning with Depression

“to someone who is depressed, everything is about depression.”
― Daphne Merkin, This Close to Happy: A Reckoning with Depression

“What would it be like as an adult to open my eyes with a feeling of even mild anticipation?”
― Daphne Merkin, This Close to Happy: A Reckoning with Depression

“I imagine a belief in God must come with a dazzling sense of purpose.”
― Daphne Merkin, This Close to Happy: A Reckoning with Depression

“even on medication, there is nothing tempting enough to make me want to rise,”
― Daphne Merkin, This Close to Happy: A Reckoning with Depression

“to be awake is to be hauled back into a pained consciousness?”
― Daphne Merkin, This Close to Happy: A Reckoning with Depression

“Spring and Fall” …cannot be said to be about depression - but of course, to someone who is depressed, everything is about depression. …For some of us, the sadness running under the skin of things begins as a trickle and ends up a hemorrhage, staining everything.”
― Daphne Merkin, This Close to Happy: A Reckoning with Depression

“Should you chance to read it a second or third time, Wuthering Heights comes at you afresh, in part because the novel seems to vanish into its own delirious origins once you've finished it, leaving no footprints, and in part because it is a literary force of nature such as you've never encountered before.”
― Daphne Merkin

“Sometimes it seems to me that the private life no longer suffices for many of us, that if we are not observed by others doing glamorous things, we might as well not exist.”
― Daphne Merkin, The Fame Lunches: On Wounded Icons, Money, Sex, the Importance of Handbags, and Other Cultural Inquiries