Places I've Taken My Body Quotes

“That my pathological fear of needing anyone for anything at all - of failing in any way, real or imagined - is linked to my insatiable desire to make myself indispensable, to find people I can get busy saving. That all of this stems from a belief that I can't trust anyone's affection if it isn't born of need.”
― Molly McCully Brown, Places I've Taken My Body: Essays

“To work your way forward when you are permanently lost means, yes, to be exhausted and adrift, a stranger in a strange land. But... it also means living in a state of endless discovery. The world unfurls itself anew each day with dawn's first cold breath on the city. You re-encounter what you are: lonely likely a body with a gift for burning.”
― Molly McCully Brown, Places I've Taken My Body: Essays

“We both know there's no returning to the beginning, no knowing who you've always been, no going home again. But we also know that there's no staying where you are: that the moment that your body sutures together into a whole and steady place you know, something will give way and you'll be changed to mere parts again.”
― Molly McCully Brown, Places I've Taken My Body: Essays

“I blame [my body] for making me feel selfish all the time, because my attention is turned so thoroughly inward, attending to its needs. I blame it for my fear that my writing will always be narrow, hemmed in by its hurt and relentlessness. I blame it for screwing with my plans, for always demanding revision to fit its stringent reality. I blame it for the fact that I'm alone here, though I chose it... Above all, though, I blame my body for the fact that, after all these years, I'm still grieving a plain stupid grief that I can't hide. I blame it for being itself, for existing to be ruined and repaired.”
― Molly McCully Brown, Places I've Taken My Body: Essays

“Constant motion camouflages the extent to which I'm alien even to myself.”
― Molly McCully Brown, Places I've Taken My Body: Essays

“Forgetting as impossible. The utter absence of memory a punishment for living on without her.”
― Molly McCully Brown, Places I've Taken My Body: Essays

“Sometimes at night, in a new hotel, I put myself to sleep by listing all the people whom I really love; all the people who I know and trust know me; the little list I'm working on of people I allow myself to need.”
― Molly McCully Brown, Places I've Taken My Body: Essays

“We return to some spaces in the world because we enter them and feel that they were made for us. Others, we come back to because we wish that they were. And still others pull us back despite our resistance, despite the grief they cause us, like there's some filament - fine and strong as fishing line - stretched from a hook in our cheek all the way to that ground.”
― Molly McCully Brown, Places I've Taken My Body: Essays