“I cut all my words out. My heart was too full of them.”
“She said it doesn’t matter what you do or how you do it: it’s all the same. You could drink, slice, do meth, snort coke, burn, cut, stab, slash, rip out your eyelashes, or fuck till you bleed and it’s all the same thing: self -harm.”
“I need release, I need to hurt myself more than the world can hurt me, and then I can comfort myself. There, there.”
“It’s counter-intuitive, yes? That hurting yourself makes you feel better. That somehow you can rid yourself of pain by causing yourself pain.”
“They should tell you, right when you get here, that that part of wishing is over. What we’ve done, no one will love us. Not in a normal way.”
“...angelic. And it was like the world was coated in gold from that moment on. It sparkled.”
“You own all of yourself, Charlie. Every last bit.”
“There is being alone, and then there is being alone. They are not the same thing at all.”
“That’s how hearts get broken,you know. When you believe in promises.”
“I guess you can’t really get rid of what you used to be. It kinda sticks to you.”
“I don’t feel sad. For just now, I don’t feel scared. I feel, for now, well, kind of triumphant.”
“Roar of the ocean, swirl of tornado. I’m being swallowed.”
“Nobody normal will love us.”
“Everyone seems to have a grip on life but me. When is anything going to get better?”
“We all have our Keifer stages, when we want to destroy ourselves in order to create. To see if that’s beautiful, too.”
“That’s the exquisiteness of youth: you are allowed the luxury of vanity, of self-examination. Take it! Don’t be ashamed of yourself.”
“I’m probably what happens of you lose control.”
“I don’t want to sit in a group where I’m the whole thing they’re trying to not be.”
“There are so many things wrong with you and it doesn’t matter.”
“It seems like for some people, making friends is like finding a shirt or a hat: you just figure out what color you want, see if it fits, and then take it home and hope everyone likes it and you.”
“I’ve always felt like an intrusion, a giant blob of wrong.”
“I look right at him. His eyes are dark and tired. He knows something about annihilation, too, which makes me a little less ashamed of my arms, I think.”
“Cutting or drinking, and I chose drinking.”
“The human body is a wonderful thing in all its fucked-upness.”
“Louisa said no one would love us in a normal way, but I’m still a person, and I’m aching to be touched.”
“You must have a million stories inside you.”
“She’s not a cookie, or a book, or a record on a shelf. You can’t just play with her and then put her back.”
“There is the person people see on the outside and then there is the person on the inside and then, even farther down, is that other, buried person, a naked and silent creature, not used to light.”
“We are such a terrible mess now.”
“I’m tired and angry at me. For letting myself get smaller and smaller in the hopes that he would notice me more. But how can someone notice you if you keep getting smaller?”
“Is my sadness because of him, or is my sadness because I am of him?”
“Holes. Human holes. I whip my head around the crowd, looking for a hole out of all these human holes.”
“ I stop. Is this how Ellis felt, this moment of certainty? The text messages flicker in front of my eyes.
Smthing hrts. U never sd hurt like this. 2 much. A sparkling lake of bottle glass is beneath my feet. I grind down into it. Let my skin soak up the lake of glass. How powerful am I? How powerful am I. I can grind the glass to my face, erase my eyes, eat glass, and disappear from the inside. There, the window, my hands, that hand, balled and aching. That hand, a fist, give me more, give me more glass, I can drink it all. The glass raining over me from the broken window, It feels like home.”
“This ocean of hurt and shame. The one she was drowning in. And I let her drown.”
“Colors by themselves can be story.”
“I think you are having a different sort of heartbreak. Maybe a kind of heartbreak of being in the world when you don’t know how to be.”
“I’m so unwhole. I don’t know where all the pieces of me are, how to fit them together, how to make them stick. Or if I even can.”
“Cutting is a fence you build upon your own body to keep people out but then you cry to be touched. But the fence is barbed. What then?”
“You be you, Charlotte. You be you.”
“I have to wait my bad feelings out and that means staying busy.”
“Maybe I was, in the end, just one more hurting girl for her, but she was kind to me, and she has to be kind to others, too, because even that small kindness, even for such a brief time- it was something. It was something.”
“...empty, but full, with hell.”
“Even assholes need help sometimes.”
“We were lost in a storm / The clouds gathered ahead / You were crying to me / Al the pain in your heart / I tried to give you / Sad girl / All the love I had left / but when push comes to shove / I’m as empty as the rest.”
“The hardest part is getting there.”
“We have to choose who we want to be, not let the situation choose us.”
“It is hard enough being a girl in the world, but try being a girl with scars on your skin in the world.”
“ Go be absolutely, positively, fucking angelic.”
