Too Bright to Hear Too Loud to See Quotes

“Not everyone can feel things as deeply as you. Most people, their feelings are ... bland, tasteless. They'll never understand what it's like to read a poem and feel almost like they're flying, or to see a bleeding fish and feel grief that shatters their heart. It's not a weakness, Grey. It's what I love about you most.”
― Juliann Garey, Too Bright to Hear Too Loud to See

“You think you should have an answer to the question, 'What's wrong?' You wish you knew. No one can understand how much you wish you knew. You know you must be horrible to live with, to be around. Because you cannot stand to be you - to be in your own skin.”
― Juliann Garey, Too Bright to Hear Too Loud to See

“Because every day when I wake up, the clouds gather, a little darker each day, and I feel less and less equipped to do anything about them. To go anywhere. To make a change. To speak more than the occasional sentence. So I go to the bookstores. I do not want to speak and I do not want to be spoken to. I find it hurts my ears. My head. My skin. And people are quiet in bookstores. I like the anonymous, mute companionship of my fellow browsers.”
― Juliann Garey, Too Bright to Hear Too Loud to See

“You read too much and you think too much. That’s your problem.”
― Juliann Garey, Too Bright to Hear Too Loud to See

“We are all of us - well, with the exception of people who have just fallen in love and those lucky demented few who see life's glass as three quarters full - we are just getting by.”
― Juliann Garey, Too Bright to Hear Too Loud to See

“I cannot pretend to be the person they think I am for one more day. Slowly, over time, like wallpaper, the face I have shown the world has peeled away. I am a building on the brink of being condemned. I have tried for the longest time to hide it. To show only the best sides of myself in the most flattering light at the best time of the day.”
― Juliann Garey, Too Bright to Hear Too Loud to See

“...You won't remember what belongs there. You will only feel the ache of absence & know something unnamable is missing”
― Juliann Garey, Too Bright to Hear Too Loud to See

“I hate that her headstone has a year on it for when she was born and another for when she died but only a dash for the life she lived in between.”
― Juliann Garey, Too Bright to Hear Too Loud to See

“Stability. The best-case scenario is stability. Not happiness, not passion, not joy. Best-case scenario: a flaccid fucking life of stability. A living flatline.”
― Juliann Garey, Too Bright to Hear Too Loud to See

“I do not believe in God. Instead I believe in the power of Family. And occasionally, when I'm feeling optimistic, in free will. But blood is a force to be reckoned with. God for example, can't give you an excellent head of hair. Your family can. They can also give you cancer. And heart disease. Nothing kills like Family.”
― Juliann Garey, Too Bright to Hear Too Loud to See

“Everybody's gotta have somebody to step on. Makes 'em feel important.'

'But there have to be better, more productive ways of proving your worth in the world - ways that don't involve crushing other people. Isn't that why we fought the war?”
― Juliann Garey, Too Bright to Hear Too Loud to See

“The moment he leaves, the bees are back. Buzzing. I breathe in and feel their tiny feet in my bronchi. Buzz. Wings beeting in my alveoli. Flutterbuzz.
[...]
Flutterflutterzzzzzzzzbuzzzzzz. I have to do something to make it stop. I have to feel something simple. This-- flutterflutterflutterbuzzzzz-- is too complicated. Too confusing. I want to feel something about which there can be no argument or debate. Soemthing about which everything will be known. Here. Now. Something that will make all the rest stop.
There is an exquisite and audible pop when the hooked tip of the center tine in the fish fork punctures the fat purple vein.”
― Juliann Garey, Too Bright to Hear Too Loud to See

“I found my way home, stripped naked, and lay on the bathroom floor, the cool tiles pushing up. Keeping me from falling. I didn't know how long the floor would hold me. I prayed Ellen would come home...”
― Juliann Garey, Too Bright to Hear Too Loud to See

“No, not just because it’s okay for boys to cry too. But because, Greyson, you are very lucky. Not everyone can feel things as deeply as you. Most people, their feelings are … bland, tasteless. They’ll never understand what it’s like to read a poem and feel almost like they’re flying, or to see a bleeding fish and feel grief that shatters their heart. It’s not a weakness, Grey. It’s what I love about you most.”
― Juliann Garey, Too Bright to Hear Too Loud to See

“Your only consolation is that you’ve been here before. But try telling that to a drowning man.”
― Juliann Garey, Too Bright to Hear Too Loud to See

“And now, it—all of it—is too much. Too hot. Too bright to hear. Too loud to see. And with no way to turn it down, there is no sleep, nothing to stop the onslaught.”
― Juliann Garey, Too Bright to Hear Too Loud to See

“At home I lose track of how many days, weeks, maybe longer I have been unable—or simply unwilling—to get out of bed. I lie on my back, staring at the insides of my eyelids, some days paralyzed by crushing despair, others trying to survive the panic that threatens to engulf me. I swear I can hear it. The panic that comes to get me breathes. It has a pulse and teeth. I am sure one day soon it will eat me alive. And then the despair returns. God’s idea of a reprieve.”
― Juliann Garey, Too Bright to Hear Too Loud to See

“I do not believe in God. Instead I believe in the power of Family. And occasionally, when I’m feeling optimistic, in free will. But blood is a force to be reckoned with. God, for example, can’t give you an excellent head of hair. Your family can. They can also give you cancer. And heart disease. Nothing kills like Family. I see my past stretched out in front of me—one flawed, damaged, beleaguered ancestor after another. The secret. The tragedy. The unfulfilled promise. The one success that got away. My present is a conglomeration of the mistakes, missteps, dubious additions to the gene pool, and bad investments made by my parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, and great-great-grandparents. But after that, there is my future—what is left when the Family has left the building. Has finished fucking with me. It’s not much to work with, but it’s mine. Thank God for free will, right?”
― Juliann Garey, Too Bright to Hear Too Loud to See

“I have to get out of here. Now. Where I go and what time I get there are largely irrelevant. I am never in the right place. The present, here, is just an anxious pit stop I make between memory (which is to say regret) and the dreadful anticipation of hoping there will be better but knowing it won’t. Many people—usually the happier ones, apparently—spend the bulk of their lives living in the here and now rather than continuously running the stoplight at its intersection. And judging by the number of self-help and talk-show gurus around, many more are looking to buy in the neighborhood. I, on the other hand, speed through, running lights and stop signs, causing one accident after another. I know this is not the way happy people live. I’ve tried to make here matter. But for whatever reason, I can’t make it count, much less make it last. Unhappy people think like this. Like me. But I try not to dwell on it. It’s a buzzkill. And inevitably leads me down a road paved with nooses and guns and toxic combinations of sedatives, vodka, and oven cleaner. It’s better just to move on.”
― Juliann Garey, Too Bright to Hear Too Loud to See

“The truth is technical, clinical, not well understood. Essentially, somewhere behind my overactive, often dysfunctional frontal lobe, my hippocampus is getting hot, and in the back of my brain, deep inside the little, almond-shaped amygdala, flashes of light are igniting a fire that burns through my memory like a box of random photos left for too long in a dusty firetrap of an attic. Some are vivid, bright, resplendent in the superior technology that preserves their detail, context, meaning. Truth. Others, many in fact, are so faded I can hardly see the contrast of negative on positive. I can barely remember the incidents, events, places, and people that were, for whatever reason, worth recording. Where does the brain stop and the mind begin? Which part of my movie is merely mechanical, chemical? And how do fantasy, fear, desire, joy, loss emerge to become the story? If there is an answer, it’s all in the editing. For most of my life, my memories have been cut together, if not perfectly, then according to some system that has allowed me reasonable access to my story. To what I wanted to remember and how I chose to remember it. I had final cut. Now they are a mess. A beautiful mess, cut and recut, and playing in no particular order across the insides of my eyelids, running both forward and backward in time as the electrical fire in my brain chases them down and ignites them. I want to reach out my hand. I want to salvage one or two of my favorite frames. But memory is fast and my hands are strapped to this table.”
― Juliann Garey, Too Bright to Hear Too Loud to See

“Everybody’s gotta have somebody to step on. Makes ’em feel important.”
― Juliann Garey, Too Bright to Hear Too Loud to See

“I nod. Pull out a chair and try to gather my thoughts. No small feat for me these days. I take a deep breath and try again. “What is … the treatment goal for people with … with what I …” Knight leans across the table toward me. “Bipolar disorder type I.” “Yeah.” “Okay … well, we want to stop the extreme mood changes. Bring down the ceiling on the mania, bring up the floor on the depression.” Knight uses his hands to illustrate the shrinking space. “Put more time between the episodes. And make the medication regimen as tolerable as possible. Stability. That’s what we’re aiming for.”
― Juliann Garey, Too Bright to Hear Too Loud to See

“I don’t know if you’re going to understand this, Greyson, but I’m going to tell you anyway. You should never be afraid to cry.” “But boys—” I started to say. “No, not just because it’s okay for boys to cry too. But because, Greyson, you are very lucky. Not everyone can feel things as deeply as you. Most people, their feelings are … bland, tasteless. They’ll never understand what it’s like to read a poem and feel almost like they’re flying, or to see a bleeding fish and feel grief that shatters their heart. It’s not a weakness, Grey. It’s what I love about you most.” Then he hugged me. Hard. And I’m not sure, but he might have been crying. That short, unsullied time when I simply thought he was special has a sense of place and a smell all its own. It is a tiny shred of my father that, like a child’s blanket, I am both attached to and embarrassed by. And that I would be devastated to lose. I suppose that irretrievable time is as much a piece of me as it is of him.”
― Juliann Garey, Too Bright to Hear Too Loud to See

“You think you should have an answer to the question, “What’s wrong?”
― Juliann Garey, Too Bright to Hear Too Loud to See

“Once I was music, now I am just noise.”
― Juliann Garey, Too Bright to Hear Too Loud to See

“in this town, if people smell weakness, they will kill you, eat you, and spit your bones into a shallow grave in the Valley. And that’s if they like you.”
― Juliann Garey, Too Bright to Hear Too Loud to See

“Suddenly everything old seems old again. Tinged with the sepia of fading Kodak photos. But I am in them.”
― Juliann Garey, Too Bright to Hear Too Loud to See

“better gone than absent.”
― Juliann Garey, Too Bright to Hear Too Loud to See

“All day, every day, there is so much noise. Everything seems so much louder than it used to. I just want to be left alone.”
― Juliann Garey, Too Bright to Hear Too Loud to See

“When did it start?” I want to give her an answer that will help. I want there to be an answer. But there isn’t one. “I don’t know. I suppose there was a beginning. But I don’t remember there being a before anymore. I only remember trying to pretend. I remember the trying.”
― Juliann Garey, Too Bright to Hear Too Loud to See