Want Quotes

“I want to tell her that I’m scared I’m too wore out, worn down, that this constant anxious ache that I have now isn’t about my job or kids or all the ways life isn’t what it should be, that maybe it’s just me, it’s most of who I am. That I loved so much believing that there was such a thing as fixing, getting better. That knowing that’s not true, that it’s all just more of the same, exhausts me more than all those nights that I can’t sleep, the miles that I run.”
― Lynn Steger Strong, Want

“I wonder if any family, after too long trying and failing to love another, can hear one another's words beyond all the ways that they fall short.”
― Lynn Steger Strong, Want

“My whole life, I’ll be better at this type of friendship and feel guilty for it; I like being needed, giving, but not so close that I can’t run away.”
― Lynn Steger Strong, Want

“We are very good at desperate emails tinged with self-destruction. Hers are more active, more interactive. We have lives that look concretely, wholly separate, lives that, if one were to track back to the causes, to the feelings and the thinking, might feel largely the same. My depression is the flattest; it’s so boring; it’s all inward—in books, at least, as well as in her emails, the characters all do things. They have too much sex; they drink; they travel and their lives at least are filled with stories that they might tell later when they’re older and they’re better, when they’re the grown-up versions of these unformed, reckless things. I envy her these stories, their shape and texture, the concreteness of her self-destruction. She is looked at, and because she’s looked at, she lives her anger and her sadness out loud and people see; I disappear and so slip down and under. I, sporadically, quite violently, try to be seen and am then further knocked down by how completely that effort fails.”
― Lynn Steger Strong, Want

“We were just privileged enough to think that we could live outside the systems and the structures and survive it, but we failed.”
― Lynn Steger Strong, Want

“Time passing is the only truth I believe in anymore.”
― Lynn Steger Strong, Want

“I don’t know the plan, I say. I wish there was one, I say. But there’s only trying to find more work. There’s only hoping that it adds up to enough. At what point, says my mother, is it time to cut your losses? At what point is it time to give up on this whole dream thing? I don’t … I start to say but don’t know what she’s asking. What dream? I ask.”
― Lynn Steger Strong, Want

“This woman sighs this big, long sigh that I think is supposed to be a sort of compliment-slash-show-of-solidarity between us. I know that if I were to sit with her by ourselves and talk a long time I’d probably like her. My quadrilingual friend is kind and brilliant and exacting and I trust she likes this woman because she is too. But I don’t have the space to sit and talk with her, to listen to and try to like her, so I sit and I allow myself to hate her, because I’m tired and it’s easy.”
― Lynn Steger Strong, Want

“I’ve been functional for years now, but I think it is a functional that is difficult for them to make sense of. I think they thought when I got better, I’d be better than they think I am.”
― Lynn Steger Strong, Want

“I think now that if I met them on the street I would find them completely fine and bland, just people. I would find them stunted and a little sad. They wouldn’t make me angry. It’s only because they are the place where the word “love” was built for me that I feel such fury toward them, that each time I get too close, I get so mad.”
― Lynn Steger Strong, Want

“At least with hate you know what you are getting. Love like that, you forget sometimes it's not love, that it's empty, all words and performance, and still sometimes you grab at it, thinking maybe it will give what love's supposed to give.”
― Lynn Steger Strong, Want

“I want everything both ways all the time and I'm tired of feeling sorry for this.”
― Lynn Steger Strong, Want

“I want to hold [her] face tight in my hands and make sure she knows that sometimes violences are small and subtle, but that only makes them harder to make sense of, to figure out how they might be forgiven, how one might make amends for them later on.”
― Lynn Steger Strong, Want

“9/11 happened my second week of college; the financial crisis came the year after we met. It would be years before we understood the implications of these chasms; we weren’t formed enough to see them, were too safe to feel their first round of hits. We made so many choices based on what we thought the world was, what it wasn’t any longer, what we’d been told it was but what we finally understand that it had never been.”
― Lynn Steger Strong, Want

“sometimes violences are small and subtle, but that only makes them harder to make sense of, to figure out how they might be forgiven, how one might make amends for them later on.”
― Lynn Steger Strong, Want

“That what my students do need—an obliteration of the same systems I grew up in, a burning down and re-creation of the spaces that I relied on all these years to keep me safe—I can’t do and don’t know how to.”
― Lynn Steger Strong, Want

“There are so many streets like this, where I have been so many different people. If anyone were to ask me why I can't leave even as this city is too hard for not-rich people, I would say it's because I'm too afraid of what would happen to all these different people somewhere else.”
― Lynn Steger Strong, Want

“This is the place where I was formed, long after forming should have happened; it’s the place where no one was looking and I felt allowed.”
― Lynn Steger Strong, Want

“So Big, Edna Ferber. About mistakes it’s funny. You’ve got to make your own; and not only that, if you try to keep other people from making theirs they get mad.”
― Lynn Steger Strong, Want

“try to picture her as Mother, and it makes a certain kind of sense. It’s so concrete. She’ll have someone to love always, something sure to be.”
― Lynn Steger Strong, Want

“My whole life, I’ll be better at this type of friendship and feel guilty for it; I like being needed, giving, but not so close that I can’t run away. A”
― Lynn Steger Strong, Want

“I still have that feeling, leaving work now daily long before I’m supposed to, that I’m supposed to be somewhere doing something, but I also think maybe what I have to do right now is walk.”
― Lynn Steger Strong, Want

“There are so many streets like this, where I have been so many different people. If anyone were to ask me why I can’t leave even as this city is too hard for not-rich people, I would say it’s because I’m too afraid of what would happen to all these different people somewhere else. This is the place where I was formed, long after forming should have happened; it’s the place where no one was looking and I felt allowed.”
― Lynn Steger Strong, Want

“There was a time I thought that all language might contain something of value, but most of life is flat and boring and the things we say are too. Or maybe it’s that most of life is so much stranger than language is able to make room for, so we say the same dead things and hope maybe the who and how of what is said can make it into what we mean.”
― Lynn Steger Strong, Want

“But I don’t have the space to sit and talk with her, to listen to and try to like her, so I sit and I allow myself to hate her, because I’m tired and it’s easy.”
― Lynn Steger Strong, Want

“It was a world phantasmagoric with declarations for which one had to track and measure meaning, under which lived conditions, contradictions, a whole world of contingencies.”
― Lynn Steger Strong, Want

“When I ask questions but don’t give answers in advance, I see not only how scared they are, because no one here has taught them how to trust their ability to think, I see how desperate for it they are, how exciting and surprising and specific their brains are.”
― Lynn Steger Strong, Want

“Teachers try sometimes to teach the way we’re told they want us to be teaching, progressive, emphasizing inquiry and exploration, but then no one seems to trust the kids can learn if information isn’t delivered to them in small, concisely bullet-pointed worksheets and PowerPoints, so teachers summarize and truncate the information, covering themselves, too afraid of all the ways our performances are judged wholly on the scores kids get on tests.”
― Lynn Steger Strong, Want

“I’m quiet more than I’m used to. I let them talk and try very hard to stay still and to listen and, every time they tell me things, I feel like I’ve lived a whole life without knowing anything and I’m so grateful that they trust me at least enough for this.”
― Lynn Steger Strong, Want

“I wonder if any family, after too long trying and failing to love one another, can hear one another's words beyond all the ways that they fall short.”
― Lynn Steger Strong, Want