chloé > chloé's Quotes

“I had a room to myself as a kid, but my mother was always quick to point out that it wasn't my room, it was her room and I was merely permitted to occupy it. Her point, of course, was that my parents had earned everything and I was merely borrowing the space, and while this is technically true I cannot help but marvel at the singular damage of this dark idea: That my existence as a child was a kind of debt and nothing, no matter how small, was mine. That no space was truly private; anything of mine could be forfeited at someone else's whim.”
― Carmen Maria Machado, In the Dream House

“I was lonely once and that was all it took. A thick haze, a smothering opacity, this was the loneliness of feeling estranged from one’s body and, by extension, the world. My loneliness asked nothing of me, it festered with inattention. Rarely did it think out loud. I neglected my loneliness and it expanded with animosity. My loneliness grew into a forest atop me.”
― Billy-Ray Belcourt, A History of My Brief Body

“A reminder to remember: just because the sharpness of the sadness has faded does not mean that it was not, once, terrible. It means only that time and space, creatures of infinite girth and tenderness, have stepped between the two of you, and they are keeping you safe as they were once unable to.”
― Carmen Maria Machado, In the Dream House

“To love someone is firstly to confess: I'm prepared to be devastated by you.”
― Billy-Ray Belcourt, A History of My Brief Body

“Love, then, isn't remotely about what we might lose when it inevitably dissipates. How unworkable love would be were we to subject it to a risk-cost benefits analysis!”
― Billy-Ray Belcourt, A History of My Brief Body

“The loneliness became more and more unbearable. I ached to be touched. I feared I was disappearing and I'd cease to exist if someone didn't touch me.”
― Leslie Feinberg, Stone Butch Blues

“I’m always soft for you, that’s the problem. You could come knocking on my door five years from now and I would open my arms wider and say ‘come here, it’s been too long, it felt like home with you.”
― Azra T.

“Words bounce. Words, if you let them, will do what they want to do and what they have to do.”
― Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red

“Then a miracle occurred in the form of a plate of sandwiches.
Geryon took three and buried his mouth in a delicious block of white bread filled with tomatoes and butter and salt.
He thought about how delicious it was, how he liked slippery foods, how slipperiness can be of different kinds.
I am a philosopher of sandwiches, he decided. Things good on the inside.”
― Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red

“How does distance look?" is a simple direct question. It extends from a spaceless within to the edge of what can be loved.”
― Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red

“Small, red, and upright he waited,
gripping his new bookbag tight
in one hand and touching a lucky penny inside his coat pocket with the other,
while the first snows of winter
floated down on his eyelashes and covered the branches around him and silenced
all trace of the world.”
― Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red

“And now time is rushing towards them
 
where they stand side by side with arms touching, immortality on their faces,
 
night at their back.”
― Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red

“I will never know how you see red and you will never know how I see it.”
― Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red

“Are there many little boys who think they are a
Monster? But in my case I am right said Geryon to the
Dog they were sitting on the bluffs The dog regarded him
Joyfully”
― Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red

“But when justice is done
the world drops away.”
― Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red

“Water! Out from between two crouching masses of the world the word leapt. ———— It was raining on his face. He forgot for a moment that he was a brokenheart then he remembered. Sick lurch downward to Geryon trapped in his own bad apple. Each morning a shock to return to the cut soul.”
― Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red

“The trouble was, I had been inadequate all along, I simply hadn't thought about it.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“It struck me how the human capacity for receptivity is a kind of birthright, an asset given to us in the moment of our creation by which we are intended to regulate the currency of our souls. Unless we give back to life as much as we take from it, this faculty will fail us sooner or later.”
― Rachel Cusk, Second Place

“and when nobody wakes you up in the morning, and when nobody waits for you at night, and when you can do whatever you want. what do you call it, freedom or loneliness?”
― Milan Kundera

“But did it count as deception if it was done in the name of self-protection? Withholding vulnerable information was a habit born of survival. I’d been lulled into letting my guard down before, only to later regret it, the admissions used against me as I bore her wrath.”
― Zaina Arafat, You Exist Too Much

“Why love what you will lose?
There is nothing else to love.”
― Louise Glück, The Triumph of Achilles

“Intense love always leads to mourning.”
― Louise Gluck, The Triumph of Achilles

“Of course I’ll hurt you. Of course you’ll hurt me. Of course we will hurt each other. But this is the very condition of existence. To become spring, means accepting the risk of winter. To become presence, means accepting the risk of absence.”
― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, ANTOINE DE SAINT-EXUPERY - MAN

“All too often women believe it is a sign of commitment, an expression of love, to endure unkindness or cruelty, to forgive and forget. In actuality, when we love rightly we know that the healthy, loving response to cruelty and abuse is putting ourselves out of harm's way.”
― Bell Hooks, All About Love: New Visions

“To return to love, to get the love we always wanted but never had, to have the love we want but are not prepared to give, we seek romantic relationships. We believe these relationships, more than any other, will rescue and redeem us. True love does have the power to redeem but only if we are ready for redemption. Love saves us only if we want to be saved.”
― bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions

“Oh, my daughter,” I said. “You will forget that I am here. This is the way of human beings, to forget. But you found your way back to me once and so can find your way back again, because I am always here. The world will hurt you again and again. You will hurt yourself again and again. And when it does, and when you do, you will remember me again and again. You will drop to your knees. You will hold yourself. You will be your own daughter again.”
― Melissa Broder, Milk Fed

“My mother had never known me either, though it wasn't because I hadn't given her a chance. I'd given her a lot of chances. What was saddest was that she didn't seem to want to know me, not as I was on the inside. I wasn't even sure if she could grasp that I had an inside, that I was real. Sometimes it seemed impossible that she had ever given birth to me at all. Other times, it made perfect sense that I had lived inside her for so long. It explained why she could only see me as an extension of herself.”
― Melissa Broder, Milk Fed

“I felt that our kissing could sustain the ritual of women loving women for eons to come.”
― Melissa Broder, Milk Fed

“I stared out the car window and understood that I was in a place where nobody knew my heart even a little bit.”
― Carol Rifka Brunt, Tell the Wolves I'm Home

“Listen, are you breathing just a little, and calling it a life? While the soul, after all, is only a window, and the opening of the window no more difficult than the wakening from a little sleep.”
― Mary Oliver, New and Selected Poems, Volume One