Killer Potential Quotes

“When you don’t have money, your imagination is forced to expand beyond the limits of what’s tolerable to rich people, who don’t need imagination at all. When you are rich, the opposite happens: the world shrinks to particularities and patterns. I can drink water only at this temperature. I can sleep on beds only with this thread count, this mattress height. I can’t live in a house without a dishwasher, an in-unit washer/dryer, a view of the ocean. The imagination folds in on itself. Space crystallizes and becomes intractable, opaque. When you are poor, space does the inverse: it hollows out. Anything can be a door. Anything can be a place to rest.”
― Hannah Deitch, Killer Potential

“I am a good listener. I am not good at most things, but that one I know is true. Teachers used to write that on my behavioral reports when I was a kid. "Listens well. Takes direction well. Quiet.”
― Hannah Deitch, Killer Potential

“There was no land to swim to. We tread water, working and working and working but the mouth kept expanding, always asking for more. It would take something ugly and violent and beautiful to tilt the world on its axis.”
― Hannah Deitch, Killer Potential

“What did you want to do? What did you want to be?”
What was all that hard work for? That’s what he was asking me. The truth was I didn’t know. I never knew. I just liked being in school. It was the closest thing I had to a safety net. Or maybe it was something like Stockholm syndrome. It was what I understood. The clear design of it, the easily navigable benchmarks. Every week, there were dozens of opportunities for me to succeed. I did it for the A. The gold star.”
― Hannah Deitch, Killer Potential

“This was the kind of partner I was used to, the kind who wanted to name what I was in relation to them, to compensate for some lack of their own, yin and yang. But people are not funhouse mirrors: we can’t stand in front of them and search only for ourselves or our absence.”
― Hannah Deitch, Killer Potential

“A woman’s face is never just a thing in itself. It is always slippery with metaphor. A lake of meaning to stare into, a surface to observe your fears, jealousies, and desires.”
― Hannah Deitch, Killer Potential

“You can share a life, not a body. You might spend all your time with another person, but you are not inside their skin, wandering the landscape of their mind. You can feel you know them to their very bones, but it is only that. A feeling you have.”
― Hannah Deitch, Killer Potential

“Power is a part of every romance. It is essential to the transaction. Can you court someone without paying for it? Can you be courted without surrendering something?”
― Hannah Deitch, Killer Potential