My Name is Monster Quotes

“…my baby’s small face is screwed up and it’s her who screams. She opens her little mouth and she lets out this big scream, and it’s like she has claws, and with that scream her claws take hold and she pulls me towards her. And I want her, I’ve never wanted anything more. I want to hold her and press my nose to her and learn every little bit of her.”
― Katie Hale, My Name is Monster

“I think of the most comforting and caring word I can. I point to myself and say, ‘Mother.”
― Katie Hale, My Name is Monster

“…it is easier to think about hating people than about wanting them.”
― Katie Hale, My Name is Monster

“Mother says I’m healing. She says this means getting better, like when my bedroom door handle broke and she fixed it to make it the way it was before. But I’m not going back to the way I was before, and anyway I don’t think that’s what healing really means, because Mother says her wolf-dog bite is healed, but she still has pink marks on her leg, so maybe healing really means making something different. Maybe getting better doesn’t mean going back to how it used to be, but moving forwards instead…”
― Katie Hale, My Name is Monster

“I start to understand why waiting has the word weight in it, because it’s heavy, this long time of nothing happening.”
― Katie Hale, My Name is Monster

“…not speaking can sometimes be just as loud as saying words.”
― Katie Hale, My Name is Monster

“Before the shiny woman, I did not think about words very much. What I mean is, I thought about them only as rucksacks to carry the meaning of what I wanted to say. And what I wanted to say was always true. The words were like containers for my thoughts. I never looked closely at words. I never thought about the volume of what they could carry, how some words carry more than others, how some carry more than they pretend to, how some do not carry anything at all.”
― Katie Hale, My Name is Monster

“Mother has always told me to let things go, as though thoughts were objects I could hold and then not hold, like watching something fall from very high up till it’s too far away to see where it lands. I do not know how to le go of thoughts like that…”
― Katie Hale, My Name is Monster

“Maybe Mother will like having another person to talk to. Maybe the only reason she doesn’t want other people is because she doesn’t know them yet and that makes her afraid…”
― Katie Hale, My Name is Monster

“When I climbed the mountain, I was not afraid. What I mean is, I hadn’t learned how to be afraid of things that were only pictures in my head. What I mean is, I think I might be braver than Mother.”
― Katie Hale, My Name is Monster

“Whenever we plant seeds, I like to hold them in my hands before putting them in the soil, just so I can look at them – little dots that will somehow grow into food that will help to keep us alive. How can such a tiny thing carry so much bigness inside it? I don’t understand how it works, but I love that it does.”
― Katie Hale, My Name is Monster

“I think it’s a wonderful thing to have a laugh like breaking glass. It means that when I laugh, it’s like breaking into a room full of treasures, it’s like a whole possibility for better things, like light in the darkness.”
― Katie Hale, My Name is Monster

“That’s what Mother calls it when she has to say something bad: breaking it. I never knew why before, but now I understand, how the words can make a crack down the middle of an ordinary morning, then push the two edges of it apart until the crack is a river and there is no getting back across it to how things used to be. And now I have to break today.”
― Katie Hale, My Name is Monster

“Her face looks like empty rucksacks, like she’s sad and there’s nothing left inside her to make her happy again.”
― Katie Hale, My Name is Monster

“Decisions made at night are tricksters, elusive and fickle, slippery as fish.”
― Katie Hale, My Name is Monster

“Surviving is an endless task, but in these moments, I let the last dregs of the day settle into place around me, and the effort seems worth almost everything.”
― Katie Hale, My Name is Monster

“I say my story starts here because endings are always a kind of beginning.”
― Katie Hale, My Name is Monster

“I had no interest in settling. Settling is what sediment does when it falls to the bottom of a sea or lake, right before it compresses for several million years and turns into a fossil. I did not understand why that was something anyone would want.”
― Katie Hale, My Name is Monster

“Maybe there is no such thing, only walls and a roof, a place secure enough to allow sleep. But how can I keep going if there is nowhere I am going to? How can I grow again without any roots?”
― Katie Hale, My Name is Monster

“Here is what I learn about walking.
Walking, like running, is about finding a pace. Stride out too quickly and you soon tire and become disheartened. Stroll too slowly and the journey can sit heavy in the bowl of your stomach.
It is not passing across a landscape. Instead, it is feeling the landscape pass under you, as if the pushing of your feet into the ground turns the Earth further away from you, like balancing on a giant ball.
You do not walk with your feet. You walk with your boots. Bad boots make the walking harder.
When you walk, you notice the details. You notice the colours and shapes and precise movements of everything around you, from blades of grass to birds to creatures scurrying through the undergrowth. It is a way of becoming intimate with the landscape.
Walking on flat roads is too easy. It lets you think too much.
Walking over uneven rocky ground is a way to escape from the mind.
Wet shoes weigh you down.
Walking on a full stomach is like a sickness.
Walking on an empty stomach is worse.
Footsteps do not make a noise at the point where your boots hit the tarmac. They also sound in your head. They echo like an organ note in a cathedral.
Even when your body sweats, the ends of your fingers are still cold.
Feet can be hot and cold at the same time.”
― Katie Hale, My Name is Monster

“I think about all the people I ever knew. Every day I remember someone else, as if they’re all buried inside me like books in a library, just waiting for my brain to pick one out.”
― Katie Hale, My Name is Monster

“I found that thinking was easier when there was someone to talk at.”
― Katie Hale, My Name is Monster

“I will stick to fields and heaths. Nature always was a more predictable place…”
― Katie Hale, My Name is Monster