Chelsea Bieker > Quotes

“But that was the way with boys. Always getting things that made them better -- pants with pockets, tools for building -- while girls received adornments, things to make us appear better to others.”
― Chelsea Bieker, Godshot

“Anyhow, most people never looked at anyone else with any clarity, one eye forever turned toward themselves.”
― Chelsea Bieker, Godshot

“I decided then to tell Artichoke to be ugly. To make herself as ugly as possible and not worry too much about beauty or what anyone thought of her. To be unpainted, to live in the breeze and stand under waterfalls and not be worried over the height of mountains, of quiet trails deep in the woods. To not be scared of roads slick with rain, of valleys dry in drought. I'd tell her 'no fear' and she'd know it was the deepest truth and she would be everything I was not. She would be wild and free. And I wouldn't worry because I knew the secret. That through all of her ugliness, all her hiking and running and jumping and falling and getting back up and saying no and saying what she wanted, her scraped hands, her freckled skin, her smart brain, she would of course be beautiful.”
― Chelsea Bieker, Godshot

“Living seemed too painful. But something began to happen on my walks. I started to understand the choice to keep living was possibly not about the past, but rather a potential for some completely different future. That is, if I chose it.”
― Chelsea Bieker, Madwoman

“When I read it seemed time could stop. It seemed perhaps my life was just another book I was in and it was anyone’s guess what the real life was.”
― Chelsea Bieker, Godshot

“This writer reminded me of the thing I’d learned at college that nearly broke me, nearly derailed my plan of forward success and normalcy: no matter what I did, I would never catch up to the very apparent generational wealth all around me. I wasn’t talking about money, though that mattered too. I was talking about the wealth of familial love. The leg up of a trauma-free or low-trauma childhood.”
― Chelsea Bieker, Madwoman

“Well, the important thing with men is to find one that won’t kill you.”
― Chelsea Bieker, Madwoman

“But then I thought of all the times the cops had come to our door, your blood on my father’s hands, me in the corner screaming the truth to a dead crowd. And how they looked past me to you, asked, “Is everything all right here?” and when you said it was, that everything was fine, they told you to keep the noise down and left us alone.”
― Chelsea Bieker, Madwoman

“I was one sunburn away from old age.”
― Chelsea Bieker, Heartbroke

“The world is not made for mothers. Yet mothers made the world.”
― Chelsea Bieker, Madwoman

“The church revealed itself to me then. Creaking wood planks, peeling and hot. Trinity Prism in the rafters, long in the face. The cheap common glitter, no specimen of heaven. Vern in a polyester robe fraying at the edges. I saw everything exactly as it was, dark and dirty, the people covered in filth, farm-beaten and raw, their deadened searching eyes, desperation. And the girls. The girls of blood, all full up like me.”
― Chelsea Bieker, Godshot

“Why do you think an easy life is a better life? You watched your mother get beat nearly to death. You were really brave. There’s value in what you did. I want you to see it that way.”
― Chelsea Bieker, Madwoman

“To have a room cheer for you and only you is a strange treasure. It felt like everyone liked me more than I had ever known and I was unwrapping their affection for the first time like a gift.”
― Chelsea Bieker, Godshot

“wondered if being a feminist meant I would end up like Christina, trapped in a high-rise in the most beautiful place in the world, the curtains drawn against the postcard view, and Celine wondered if it meant she would end up like you, beautiful, broken, a monument to lost potential.”
― Chelsea Bieker, Madwoman

“But where was aloneness in our house? My children occupied every corner and filled every silence. The thing about motherhood was that everything was happening all the time.”
― Chelsea Bieker, Madwoman

“The world is not made for us [...] but this thing I'm starting to understand, transforming from felt to known, it's about the energy of violence. The way violence shrinks women, makes us feel lucky for things that aren't lucky. Even when we think we've outrun it, look back - see it's long reaching fingers touching every choice we've made.”
― Chelsea Bieker, Madwoman

“Sometimes now I pass by churches. I park my car in the back rows of lots and watch the bodies file in. I don’t follow. It doesn’t mean God is nothing to me now. It means I’ll spend the rest of my life trying to figure out belief, and if the good I know of God is true, there is time enough.”
― Chelsea Bieker, Godshot

“The loneliness of a monster can only become sentimental after it is dead.”
― Chelsea Bieker, Godshot

“You found God?" It came from my mouth like the deepest routine.
He looked me up and down, side-smiling. "I found you.”
― Chelsea Bieker, Godshot

“I liked to imagine I could have both a life of my own and the love of a man but I had never seen such a combination turn out.”
― Chelsea Bieker, Heartbroke

“She was easy to love and attracted caregiving men all the time. She had a quality that made you want to hug her and then put her in a cage and feed her with a small spoon.”
― Chelsea Bieker, Heartbroke

“I thought about what I had always wanted more than anything and I knew then immediately in my haze like the surest thing. I wanted unconditional love from my mother, and I was not going to have that. But somehow I held unconditional love for her. Perhaps giving it away could be its own reward.”
― Chelsea Bieker, Godshot

“The body always knows.”
― Chelsea Bieker, Godshot

“Honey, like my Daddy Leon always said, 'If the world don't treat you right, go ahead and treat yourself to the world.”
― Chelsea Bieker, Heartbroke

“You had come to collect.”
― Chelsea Bieker, Madwoman

“One day the thought came to me to try things differently than she said they had to be, and so I did. But it wasn’t easy letting her go. It was a death.”
― Chelsea Bieker, Madwoman

“We never felt bad about stealing. Life owed us minor rewards.”
― Chelsea Bieker, Madwoman

“... your face a map of what my father had done to you.”
― Chelsea Bieker, Madwoman

“I decided: I would not kill myself. I had not made it this far just to die. My whole life had been about surviving, and now I had, hadn't I?”
― Chelsea Bieker, Madwoman

“We put diseased animals out of their misery”
― Chelsea Bieker, Madwoman