The Dead Ladies Project Quotes

“When someone says a song or a book or a poem saved their life, this is what they mean: • it took me out of my brain for the one second needed to get back onto the planet • it shot out a spark into the distance that I could then build a path toward • it opened something up in my imagination Because suicide is the result of the death of the imagination. You forget how to dream up other possible futures. You can’t picture new maneuvers, new ways around. Everything is just the catastrophic present and there will never be a time this is not so. That is what kills you. What saves you is a new story to tell yourself about how things could be.”
― Jessa Crispin, The Dead Ladies Project: Exiles, Expats, & Ex-Countries

“Maybe the trick is not to define yourself as a container for your experiences, your thoughts. Maybe it's to assume you are larger than the things you have felt over a series of years, that your history is not a list of things your body has done or been present for, that your family is not people who you spent a lot of time around as a child or carry your genetic code. Maybe the trick is to push violently at your own boundaries, to find your own contradictions, and use your teeth and nails to destroy what separates you from something else.

I am trying.”
― Jessa Crispin, The Dead Ladies Project: Exiles, Expats, and Ex-Countries

“We don't do well with infinity and endless possibility, and so we break things down into individual units and into stories. And then we accidentally believe in those stories, and we accidentally start acting them out. Stories about what love is, what happiness is. What men are, what women are. Unable to shape our own stories about the madness that surrounds us, we get infected with other people's stories, trying to ignore the discomfort that comes with an imperfect fit.”
― Jessa Crispin, The Dead Ladies Project: Exiles, Expats, and Ex-Countries

“If there ever were one moment where everything worked for us, where we lived in harmony and at ease with our natures, then we would still be there. There is no garden to return to, no idyllic perfect childhood, no enwombed state. The Garden of Eden was boring, childhood is a nightmare we should all be grateful to be done with, and your mother smoked while she was pregnant and poisoned you in the womb with artificial sugar substitutes. The best thing any of us can do is just to keep fucking up in a forward motion, and see what comes out of it.”
― Jessa Crispin, The Dead Ladies Project: Exiles, Expats, and Ex-Countries

“As a child dragged out of bed at 2 a.m. by my Carl Sagan–worshiping father, I would pick a section of sky and watch it closely, waiting for the meteors to move through it. Waiting for the meteors to come to me. I would frustrate myself, angry when my sisters gasped and squealed as they saw stars fall while my chosen sky remained static. One has to open oneself up, take in the whole canvas without choosing, without discriminating. Relinquish focus and choose expansion. That is the song of the call to prayer. It moves you upward and outward, works you out of three dimensions and into four. Widen your scope, it sings. Unfix yourself. Allow yourself to move endlessly. Why choose a fragment when you can have the whole night sky?”
― Jessa Crispin, The Dead Ladies Project: Exiles, Expats, & Ex-Countries

“It's a favorite myth in our culture that hardship makes you a better person, that is is merely the grindstone on which your essence is refined and polished. But the truth is that scarcity, depression, thwarted ambition, and suffering most often leave the person a little twisted. That is the territory where mean drunks and tyrannical bastards come from.”
― Jessa Crispin, The Dead Ladies Project: Exiles, Expats, and Ex-Countries

“We are not slaves to unconscious drives unless we insist on believing that the subconscious is weaker or less important or dumber than our logical skills, if we neglect it and don't dive in. The important task is to understand and modify the stories that are holding sway. You can't bully the prerational with the rational. You need to communicate with it on its level: myth, ritual, symbol, metaphor.”
― Jessa Crispin, The Dead Ladies Project: Exiles, Expats, and Ex-Countries

“I can’t find an answer about how to bridge the terror of the past with the equally important needs of forgetting and remembrance. For walking around conscious and aware but without slipping too far into either cynical indifference or humorless stridency.”
― Jessa Crispin, The Dead Ladies Project: Exiles, Expats, & Ex-Countries

“But twenty-two-year-old women, fledgling intellectuals, need someone to look up to, someone they can recognize as kin and seek to emulate. The problem is when you hit twenty-eight and your role model’s mediocrity begins to show, and you cringe in the way you cringed when you went to an Ani DiFranco concert for nostalgia’s sake.”
― Jessa Crispin, The Dead Ladies Project: Exiles, Expats, & Ex-Countries

“Understanding the violence of our history does not mean we refuse to condemn atrocity when we see it because we resign ourselves to its everywhere existence.”
― Jessa Crispin, The Dead Ladies Project: Exiles, Expats, & Ex-Countries

“I would slay myself on the altar of boredom if given the chance.”
― Jessa Crispin, The Dead Ladies Project: Exiles, Expats, and Ex-Countries

“Somehow I have slipped. I have to sleep with my computer right by the bed just in case I wake up and start having thoughts. My thoughts need constant interruption, as the stickiness of it will never work, things will never get better, all is lost, the sea wants to have a conversation with you—it all traps me in the same place. I have television, blogs, social media all queued up to keep me from having thoughts.”
― Jessa Crispin, The Dead Ladies Project: Exiles, Expats, & Ex-Countries