Gretchen Quotes

“how important it is to respect someone’s secrets, because they own their secrets, and you own yours.”
― Shannon Kirk, Gretchen

“I know I don’t need to be strong for her. She has all the strength, and I am allowed to be weak, and this makes me feel, oddly, stronger for it.”
― Shannon Kirk, Gretchen

“This is Mom, all right. Here’s a guy telling us about the horrible death of his wife and child, and the horror of his four-year-old screaming in the woods with those dead bodies, and Mom is thinking about our little duo. She is always only laser focused on us, which, in the last year, I’ve recognized more and more, and in that recognition, I’ve come to appreciate her crazy level of protection, but also to detest it. Mom’s obsession with protecting us is like a comforting, comfortable room sometimes, and others, a claustrophobic, windowless cell of steel air.”
― Shannon Kirk, Gretchen

“I’m only almost strong; a wedge of weakness slices into me, a wedge I can’t seem to close. Feels like I could be a solid wheel, but I’m missing a slice of myself, and I don’t know what the slice is or where it went off to or even how to define it. So I have no idea what to look for to make me whole—the missing item that would stop this sliver of sneaky panic that rises out of nowhere and chokes the stronger slices of me.”
― Shannon Kirk, Gretchen

“that ever-sneaky anxiety over newness makes itself known in me again, making me queasy and fearful.”
― Shannon Kirk, Gretchen

“We look happy on the outside, and I’m playing my part for her, but my smile is false. This sunlight is fake. Nobody knows how you really feel in the very center of yourself.”
― Shannon Kirk, Gretchen