How to Hide in Plain Sight Quotes

“I get it now, I do. I don't know how to turn it off, but what I do know is this: I'm addicted to the worries, I'm addicted to self torture and self hate and any other version of the self that reaffirms the belief that there is a deep, disgusting darkness within me.”
― emma noyes, How to Hide in Plain Sight

“Happiness to me isn't a presence, it's an absence. The absence of worry, of fear of sadness, the thoughts and compulsions that led my life for so long. I'd worked hard to get myself to where I was right now. I'd pulled myself out of the chaos of my own mind - and routine is what got me there.”
― Emma Noyes, How to Hide in Plain Sight

“But this isn’t an illness. This can’t be cured with a few hugs and a capful of pink goo. This is me. Every thought, no matter how bizarre, no matter how disturbing—I create it. It comes from me. It’s made of me. Your thoughts are the mental manifestation of what you look like inside. Rotten thoughts? Rotten insides.”
― Emma Noyes, How to Hide in Plain Sight

“Memory of pain is often worse than the pain itself. It drives us. What we do or don’t do, embrace or fear, repeat or avoid at all costs—all of that is dictated by our memory of pain.”
― Emma Noyes, How to Hide in Plain Sight

“I thought Cradle Island would fix us. I did. That the waters would heal us, just the way Mom said they could. But here we are, and everywhere I turn, I see grief. I see it in the strange actions of my siblings and the dead silence at the dinner table and the hushed voices of my parents in the hallway outside my bedroom door. Grief didnt't leave; if anything, it burrowed even deeper in. Took the place of the one who left. Grief sits in Henry's chair at dinner, sleeps in his bed at night. The island, which once seemed ready to burst from all the life packed onto its shores, has become a colorless place.”
― Emma Noyes, How to Hide in Plain Sight

“Suddenly my mind feels so crowded, as if my thoughts aren’t filtering out in the way most thoughts do. As if something is blocking the exit. As if, rather than in and out of my mind in an orderly line, one thought replacing another, they linger. All of them. Half sound like me; they speak with the internal voice I’ve always recognized as my own. The other half do not. The other half—they have their own voice. They’re loud. So loud. The other half—they have their own voice. They’re loud. So loud. They’re a living thing. They’re hundreds of blind moths in search of a flame, flying chaotically about my mind, crashing into each other, knocking things over. I cringe as glass shatters in places I can’t see.”
― Emma Noyes, How to Hide in Plain Sight

“Youth is good for that; drink yourself to chaos and wake free of the consequences. Poison yourself within an inch of death—on purpose—and bounce back so quickly you’d think nothing ever happened. Some unknown mechanism lets us skip the pain. Call it genetics. Call it invincibility. Call it the power of a blank slate, of a body not yet punished enough to reveal its cracks. It’s an ability of which we aren’t even aware, but we miss it when it leaves. Resilience is wasted on the young. Our ability to push past anything, even embarrassment, even poison. Spring back into life, gait unchanged, suffering nothing more than vertigo and an invisible heap of sorrow amassing in the pit of our stomachs. A growing heap of trauma. Add to the pile with every fake smile, every unacknowledged ordeal. Dig into it only years later. By then, the heap will have grown so large it will be impossible to see all at once. But for now, it lies dormant, growing, collecting misery.”
― Emma Noyes, How to Hide in Plain Sight

“it has planted a seed of doubt in my mind. And that seed will grow. It will grow lips and teeth and a jawline. It will argue with me. It will send me in circles. Awful, torturous circles. I will never know the truth. I will never know my own sexuality.”
― Emma Noyes, How to Hide in Plain Sight

“Resilience is wasted on the young. Our ability to push past anything, even embarrassment, even poison. Spring back into life, gait unchanged, suffering nothing more than vertigo and an invisible heap of sorrow amassing in the pit of our stomachs. A growing heap of trauma. Add to the pile with every fake smile, every unacknowledged ordeal. Dig into it only years later. By then, the heap will have grown so large it will be impossible to see all at once. But for now, it lies dormant, growing, collecting misery.”
― Emma Noyes, How to Hide in Plain Sight