Piles of empty pages like mountains of potential failure.
I didn't know if I could justify myself enough to breathe in.Submitted on Thursday, March 19, 2009 - 14:30 — GabrielleWho Said It?:NamelessnumberheadmanSource:Going to Breathe Again
Link to full quote: Quote #1473 from Going to Breathe Again by Namelessnumberheadman.
As an adolescent, she realises with mounting horror that they were not kidding: for her to walk alone will be a fraught activity forever. Anorexia, bulimia and exercise fixations work off and numb the frustration of the claustrophobia that accompanies the girl's grieving realisation that the wide world she had imagined, and just inherited, is shut down to her by the threat of sexual violence.
If she were to eat, she would have energy; but adolescence is arranged for the safe venting of masculine steam. From athletic events to sexual conquests to a moody walk in the woods, boys have outlets for that agitation of waiting to fly. But if a girl has her full measure of wanderlust, libido and curiosity, she is in a bad way. With ample stores of sugar to set off the buzz for intellectual exploration, starch to convert into restlessness in her elongating legs, fat to fuel her sexual curiosity, and the fearlessness born from a lack of concern over where her next meal will come from - she will get into trouble.
What if she doesn't worry about her body and eats enough for all the growing she has to do? She might rip her stockings and slam-dance on a forged ID to the Pogues, and walk home barefoot, holding her shoes, alone at dawn; she might baby-sit in a battered-woman's shelter one night a month; she might skateboard down Lombard Street with its seven hair-pin turns, or fall in love with her best friend and do something about it, or lose herself for hours...Submitted on Tuesday, August 4, 2009 - 10:42 — GabrielleWho Said It?:Naomi WolfSource:The Beauty Myth
Link to full quote: Quote #2324 from The Beauty Myth by Naomi Wolf.
Pain is real when you get other people to believe in it. If no one believes in it but you, your pain is madness or hysteria.
Submitted on Thursday, March 19, 2009 - 14:30 — GabrielleWho Said It?:Naomi WolfSource:'Violence', The Beauty Myth
Link to full quote: Quote #1538 from 'Violence', The Beauty Myth by Naomi Wolf.
Life is a burden to me, nothing gives me any pleasure. I only find sadness in everything around me. It is very difficult because the ways of those with whom I live, and probably always shall live, are as different from mine as moonlight is from sunlight.
Submitted on Thursday, March 19, 2009 - 14:30 — GabrielleWho Said It?:Napoléon Bonaparte
Link to full quote: Quote #1681 by Napoléon Bonaparte.
It requires more courage to suffer than to die.
Submitted on Thursday, March 19, 2009 - 14:28 — GabrielleWho Said It?:Napoléon Bonaparte
Link to full quote: Quote #303 by Napoléon Bonaparte.
When she lowers her eyes she seems to hold all the beauty in the world between her eyelids; when she raises them I see only myself in her gaze.
Submitted on Thursday, March 19, 2009 - 14:29 — GabrielleWho Said It?:Natalie Clifford BarneySource:Their Lovers
Link to full quote: Quote #822 from Their Lovers by Natalie Clifford Barney.
My skin is like a map
of where my heart has been
And I can't hide the marks
It's not a negative thing.Submitted on Thursday, March 19, 2009 - 14:29 — GabrielleWho Said It?:Natasha BedingfieldSource:I Bruise Easily
Link to full quote: Quote #1048 from I Bruise Easily by Natasha Bedingfield.
I bruise easily
so be gentle when you handle me
There's a mark you leave
Like a love heart carved on a tree
I bruise easily
Can't scratch the surface
without moving me underneath
I bruise easily.Submitted on Thursday, March 19, 2009 - 14:29 — GabrielleWho Said It?:Natasha BedingfieldSource:I Bruise Easily
Link to full quote: Quote #1049 from I Bruise Easily by Natasha Bedingfield.
Every individual has a place to fill in the world, and is important, in some respects, whether he chooses to be so or not.
Submitted on Thursday, March 19, 2009 - 14:28 — GabrielleWho Said It?:Nathaniel HawthorneSource:American Note-Books
Link to full quote: Quote #68 from American Note-Books (October 25, 1836) by Nathaniel Hawthorne.
It's so hard to talk when you want to kill yourself. That's above and beyond everything else, and it's not a mental complaint -- it's a physical thing, like it's physically hard to open your mouth and make the words come out. They don't come out smooth and in conjunction with your brain the way normal people's words do; they come out in chunks as if from a crushed-ice dispenser; you stumble on them as they gather behind your lower lip. So you just keep quiet.
Submitted on Thursday, March 19, 2009 - 14:28 — GabrielleWho Said It?:Ned VizziniSource:It's Kind of a Funny Story
Link to full quote: Quote #533 from It's Kind of a Funny Story by Ned Vizzini.
She had waited until her husband and children were far away, and had driven into the snowy woods, and ended it. Just let it all go.
She had wanted the pain to stop. The heart-hurt. She slept her way into death, only waking when the Highway Patrol found her body.
She was cold, rigid, frozen, when they found her.
Someone like that, said the patrolwoman. You'd think she'd have everything to live for.
She tried to speak, to tell them that that was what made the pain unbearable but, like someone caught in a bad dream, she could not make herself heard. She screamed, and no sound came out. She watched as they took her body away.
She sat by the side of the road, in the snow, all bodiless and afraid, waiting for the happiness to start.
Submitted on Saturday, February 27, 2010 - 01:52 — GabrielleWho Said It?:Neil Gaiman
Link to full quote: Quote #2493 from The Sandman: Endless Nights - 4. Despair - Fifteen Portraits of Despair by Neil Gaiman.
'The devil made me do it.' I have never made one of them do anything. Never. They live their own tiny lives. I do not live their lives for them.
Submitted on Saturday, August 1, 2009 - 15:24 — GabrielleWho Said It?:Neil Gaiman
Link to full quote: Quote #2286 from The Sandman: Season of Mists - 2 (#23) by Neil Gaiman.
Let us begin this letter, this prelude to an encounter, formally, as a declaration, in the old-fashioned way: I love you. You do not know me (although you have seen me, smiled at me). I know you (although not so well as I would like. I want to be there when your eyes flutter open in the morning, and you see me, and you smile. Surely this would be paradise enough?). So I do declare myself to you now, with pen set to paper. I declare it again: I love you.
Submitted on Friday, April 24, 2009 - 08:48 — GabrielleWho Said It?:Neil Gaiman
Link to full quote: Quote #2236 from letter by Neil Gaiman from Four Letter Word: Invented Correspondence from the Edge of Modern Romance (Joshua Knelman, Rosalind Porter).
Here: an exercise in choice. Your choice. One of these tales is true.
She lived through the war. In 1959 she came to America. She now lives in a condo in Miami, a tiny Frenchwoman with white hair, with a daughter and a granddaughter. She keeps herself to herself and smiles rarely, as if the weight of memory keeps her from finding joy.
Or that's a lie. Actually the Gestapo picked her up during a border crossing in 1943, and they left her in a meadow. First she dug her own grave, then a single bullet to the back of the skull.
Her last thought, before that bullet, was that she was four months' pregnant, and that if we do not fight to create a future there will be no future for any of us.
There is an old woman in Miami who wakes, confused, from a dream of the wind blowing the wildflowers in a meadow.
There are bones untouched beneath the warm French earth which dream of a daughter's wedding. Good wine is drunk. The only tears shed are happy ones.
Submitted on Thursday, March 19, 2009 - 14:30 — GabrielleWho Said It?:Neil GaimanSource:Strange Little Girls
Link to full quote: Quote #2063 from Strange Little Girls by Neil Gaiman.
No man, proclaimed Donne, is an Island, and he was wrong. If we were not islands, we would be lost, drowned in each other's tragedies. We are insulated (a word that means, literally, remember, made into an island) from the tragedy of others, by our island nature, and by the repetitive shape and form of the stories. The shape does not change: there was a human being who was born, lived, and then, by some means or another, died. There. You may fill in the details from your own experience. As unoriginal as any other tale, as unique as any other life. Lives are snowflakes--forming patterns we have seen before, as like one another as peas in a pod (and have you ever looked at peas in a pod? I mean, really looked at them? There's not a chance you'd mistake one for another, after a minute's close inspection), but still unique.
Without individuals we see only numbers.
Submitted on Thursday, March 19, 2009 - 14:30 — GabrielleWho Said It?:Neil GaimanSource:American Gods
Link to full quote: Quote #2050 from American Gods by Neil Gaiman.
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