Madwoman Quotes

“Living seemed too painful. But something began to happen on my walks. I started to understand the choice to keep living was possibly not about the past, but rather a potential for some completely different future. That is, if I chose it.”
― Chelsea Bieker, Madwoman

“This writer reminded me of the thing I’d learned at college that nearly broke me, nearly derailed my plan of forward success and normalcy: no matter what I did, I would never catch up to the very apparent generational wealth all around me. I wasn’t talking about money, though that mattered too. I was talking about the wealth of familial love. The leg up of a trauma-free or low-trauma childhood.”
― Chelsea Bieker, Madwoman

“Well, the important thing with men is to find one that won’t kill you.”
― Chelsea Bieker, Madwoman

“The world is not made for mothers. Yet mothers made the world.”
― Chelsea Bieker, Madwoman

“But then I thought of all the times the cops had come to our door, your blood on my father’s hands, me in the corner screaming the truth to a dead crowd. And how they looked past me to you, asked, “Is everything all right here?” and when you said it was, that everything was fine, they told you to keep the noise down and left us alone.”
― Chelsea Bieker, Madwoman

“The world is not made for us [...] but this thing I'm starting to understand, transforming from felt to known, it's about the energy of violence. The way violence shrinks women, makes us feel lucky for things that aren't lucky. Even when we think we've outrun it, look back - see it's long reaching fingers touching every choice we've made.”
― Chelsea Bieker, Madwoman

“Why do you think an easy life is a better life? You watched your mother get beat nearly to death. You were really brave. There’s value in what you did. I want you to see it that way.”
― Chelsea Bieker, Madwoman

“But where was aloneness in our house? My children occupied every corner and filled every silence. The thing about motherhood was that everything was happening all the time.”
― Chelsea Bieker, Madwoman

“You had come to collect.”
― Chelsea Bieker, Madwoman

“One day the thought came to me to try things differently than she said they had to be, and so I did. But it wasn’t easy letting her go. It was a death.”
― Chelsea Bieker, Madwoman

“wondered if being a feminist meant I would end up like Christina, trapped in a high-rise in the most beautiful place in the world, the curtains drawn against the postcard view, and Celine wondered if it meant she would end up like you, beautiful, broken, a monument to lost potential.”
― Chelsea Bieker, Madwoman

“There’s something inside me,” I said. “My father had it too — it turns up different in me”
― Chelsea Bieker, Madwoman

“I loved the way I’d trained myself”
― Chelsea Bieker, Madwoman

“I didn’t like that the Butcher now thought of me this way”
― Chelsea Bieker, Madwoman

“The key to peace between my father and me was to pretend he was not the source of our pain.”
― Chelsea Bieker, Madwoman

“I watched you take us in and instinctively moved away from him. I knew you collected these happy images to later use as reasons for why we couldn’t leave.”
― Chelsea Bieker, Madwoman

“My worst fears lived in the realm of unexpected complications long after the main trauma”
― Chelsea Bieker, Madwoman

“But now my babies had transformed into kids. Walking”
― Chelsea Bieker, Madwoman

“We put diseased animals out of their misery”
― Chelsea Bieker, Madwoman

“I’ll carry the burden of you and my father and everything that happened on the island for the rest of my life. But I vowed to carry it in silence. So many lies I’ve told to ensure it would be my secret forever. Mine to death. I really had things figured out. Until the morning I got your letter.”
― Chelsea Bieker, Madwoman

“My life was my life. All I endured had led me here.”
― Chelsea Bieker, Madwoman

“We did not owe the world a truth that could be used against us.”
― Chelsea Bieker, Madwoman

“... your face a map of what my father had done to you.”
― Chelsea Bieker, Madwoman

“For a long time, I liked knowing you were okay in the world. I never wanted to intrude.”
― Chelsea Bieker, Madwoman

“She was so miraculous it seemed there was not a single hardship her perfection couldn't stamp off.”
― Chelsea Bieker, Madwoman

“How I thought, Wait, wait, I want him to love the real me, but by then it was too late. He already loved the version i showed him. He'd already chosen her.”
― Chelsea Bieker, Madwoman

“I had always been angry at him. His stupid optimism, his desire to help when help was not asked for. For seeing me as damaged as I really was.”
― Chelsea Bieker, Madwoman

“It's a long way back to seventeen, but I was there now.”
― Chelsea Bieker, Madwoman

“My entire life, devoted to the war of you both.”
― Chelsea Bieker, Madwoman

“My father's rage flew into my hands.”
― Chelsea Bieker, Madwoman