Rainbow Black Quotes

“Fear is natural, I was sure she would say. Fear is good. Fear is the universe whispering in your ear: I want you to survive.”
― Maggie Thrash, Rainbow Black

“We cast the spell in the girls’ bathroom during the middle of fifth period. “Turn off the lights and summon all the blackness of your soul into a spinning ball of energy behind your third eye chakra,” I instructed her. “Breathe in and fan the flames of the curse inside you.” Of all the self-destructive things I’d done, this was probably the stupidest, the one I have no excuse for. The last thing my parents needed was for me to get caught improvising Satanic rituals with a local weirdo. But I had crossed over into that thoughtless, uncaring “fuck it” stage of life: in other words, I was a teenager. I raised my arms. “We curse you for all eternity, George Bush. You promised not to raise taxes, but you lied! Read my lips: we curse you!” “Mention Iran-Contra,” Natasha said. “We also curse you for Iran-Contra!” “And for being a lame square,” she added. “You are a lame square, George Bush. May you lose reelection and choke on the taxes you stole from the American people! I summon the howling demons of hell and curse you! Now expel the curse from your heart chakra. Aaaaaaooooo!”
― Maggie Thrash, Rainbow Black

“So I weighed my options, going back and forth about whether I should cut her off completely before I got too attached or try to get as much love from her as possible while she lasted.”
― Maggie Thrash, Rainbow Black

“In jail, it becomes apparent how maladapted our society is to supporting lasting bonds. I's like we're trying to destroy love. Smothering it in concrete, deadening it with consumer good and blitzes of media. We are exceptional -- we are the only specific that acts directly, consciously, against its self-interest. Over, and over, and over. (401)”
― Maggie Thrash, Rainbow Black

“Would I not have loved her if your positioned were reversed, making me the benign one and her the one with a heart deformed by violence? Of course I would have. (400)”
― Maggie Thrash, Rainbow Black

“It was the kind of regret that gave lobotomies a certain appeal. Better to have it all wiped clean than to spend the rest of your life defined by one impulsive, destructive, decision. One lie. One pull of a trigger. (page 387)”
― Maggie Thrash, Rainbow Black

“But I knew. He was punishing me. Just like his wife, I'd failed to be the woman he needed me to be to make his life meaningful. (Page 296)”
― Maggie Thrash, Rainbow Black

“But at the end of the day, Mr. Hantz was just a man doing what men do: twisting the story around to cast himself as the hero. (293)”
― Maggie Thrash, Rainbow Black

“Malice begets evil and more malice. It spreads like a disease. It make's people's souls rot off, like syphilis.”
― Maggie Thrash, Rainbow Black

“My mother had always made it seem like losing my virginity would feel like becoming a luminous fruit on the tree of knowledge. The reality was I felt a lumpy apple someone had taken a bite out of and left on the ground to rot.”
― Maggie Thrash, Rainbow Black

“…nothing to my name but the rugged will to live, which is beautiful and horrible– a lone, gnarled tree jutting from the cliffside, exposed, hanging on.”
― Maggie Thrash, Rainbow Black

“All I can say is that freedom’s a feeling I’ll never know: to be so beautiful you terrify the world, daring it to annihilate you. Unlike me, whose only hope is to survive.”
― Maggie Thrash, Rainbow Black

“Then again, what else could love be, beyond surrendering your life to another person?”
― Maggie Thrash, Rainbow Black

“She’d dedicated her whole adult life to putting people in prison without ever realizing she was inside one herself.”
― Maggie Thrash, Rainbow Black

“Everyone wants to talk about MY BODY. No one understands MY MIND.”
― Maggie Thrash, Rainbow Black

“They were treating me like a far more dangerous person than I was, and it made me feel powerful, at least for a little while.”
― Maggie Thrash, Rainbow Black

“But it would be a sin to use the law to punish nature for the crimes of human nature.”
― Maggie Thrash, Rainbow Black

“Soul mates do exist. But it’s not what we thought it was. It’s not about partnership. It’s not even about love. It’s about something more powerful than that. It’s about life. Survival.”
― Maggie Thrash, Rainbow Black

“I disliked being hungover as much as the next person, but I couldn’t deny it held a kind of masochistic relish, like inhaling the scent of a loved one’s old sweater.”
― Maggie Thrash, Rainbow Black

“You think people choose to be stupid?”
“Yes,” I said. “I absolutely do.”
― Maggie Thrash, Rainbow Black

“I don’t make wishes,” I said. “I live in the world.”
― Maggie Thrash, Rainbow Black

“Identity was cheap, it turned out.”
― Maggie Thrash, Rainbow Black

“Je suis désolé, but a ‘community’ of wolves has eaten all your children!”
― Maggie Thrash, Rainbow Black

“Identity overhaul is a queer rite of passage.”
― Maggie Thrash, Rainbow Black

“Of the many doors I’d assumed were shut to me forever, some oversight had left beauty ajar.”
― Maggie Thrash, Rainbow Black

“I suddenly understood why people took off in the night: goodbyes are far harder for the people saying them than the person hearing them.”
― Maggie Thrash, Rainbow Black

“All cats are lesbians,” my sister used to say. “Even the boys.”
― Maggie Thrash, Rainbow Black

“The fact that I spoke of murder like it was a mildly difficult chore should tell you everything you need to know about my headspace at the time.”
― Maggie Thrash, Rainbow Black

“It seemed I had reached my threshold for pain. I was, suddenly, done.”
― Maggie Thrash, Rainbow Black

“Meanwhile my father had remained godlike in my eyes, the sum of man’s potential to be noble and good. The reality that he was just a man was too much to bear.”
― Maggie Thrash, Rainbow Black