Caitlin Devlin > Quotes

“The way you grew up is allowed to have left a mark on you,’ she says. ‘You don’t have to meet everyone’s individual trauma yardsticks. You feel how you feel. It affects you how it affects you. If it takes a toll on you then it takes a fucking toll on you. No one else’s opinion can change that, as much as they might try.’ I want to cry. I never realised how long I’d been waiting to be told that.”
― Caitlin Devlin, The Real Deal

“You don’t have to meet everyone’s individual trauma yardsticks. You feel how you feel. It affects you how it affects you. If it takes a toll on you then it takes a fucking toll on you. No one else’s opinion can change that, as much as they might try.”
― Caitlin Devlin, The Real Deal

“But the anger is a raft. I know that if I let go of it then I’ll have to contend with the uncomfortable truth that maybe I’m just made of different stuff from the rest of them. Softer, smaller, more vulnerable stuff. The kind of stuff that bruises like peaches and sinks in storms.”
― Caitlin Devlin, The Real Deal

“There are two kinds of peace. One is the sun-dappled walls of a bookshop, the gentle emptiness of your own bedroom – a kind of undisturbed, predictable peace in which you are only ever exactly what you are. The other is the peace that comes when no one sees you as anything more than another piece of a crowded picture. As soon as they turn away from you, you don’t exist. This is the peace I find in central London, on the days when no one recognises me. That feeling of disappearing into the noise.”
― Caitlin Devlin, The Real Deal

“The way you grew up is allowed to have left a mark on you,’ she says. ‘You don’t have to meet everyone’s individual trauma yardsticks.”
― Caitlin Devlin, The Real Deal

“If I loved her at twelve, I was too young to know what love was. If I loved her at fifteen, I was too isolated to know how to love anyone else. If I love her now, I don’t really know who she’s grown into well enough to love her. I’ve spent too long without her to love her in completion, to love this new map of her. All of this is true. I love her all the same.”
― Caitlin Devlin, The Real Deal

“She taught me to leave a hair in every Uber I took at night, just in case something went wrong with the tracking.”
― Caitlin Devlin, The Real Deal

“He was the only person who understood me, at one point in my life. The only person I felt I could depend on. But he shouldn’t have been. Howie is not a good person. Howie might not even see me as a person at all.”
― Caitlin Devlin, The Real Deal

“But kids have to be able to try things that the grown-ups around them failed at. Otherwise, none of us will ever grow up.”
― Caitlin Devlin, The Real Deal

“Fuck it,’ said Mum. ‘Alright. Childhood alcoholism here we come.”
― Caitlin Devlin, The Real Deal

“It’s like they’ve unearthed a young Britney Spears.”
― Caitlin Devlin, The Real Deal

“You can’t will it away, that feeling of being broken open in front of other people. Even when you live your life in fear of it, you’re never quite prepared for the fingers clawing their way under your skin.”
― Caitlin Devlin, The Real Deal

“I suppose people told me I was, when I was twelve. That I was perfect for it. And so every time I felt not perfect for it, when I was growing up, it would make me feel awful. It just started to not be fun. It started to make me feel awful.”
― Caitlin Devlin, The Real Deal

“The nice thing is,’ she says, ‘You don’t actually have to be anything. You can work in a bookshop and take your sister to dance class and fall in love and drink wine in the street and watch the same film three times in one week, and it doesn’t have to be depressing or boring or like you’re not going anywhere, because you don’t have to go somewhere, you know?’ ‘I want to go into my thirties having achieved something.’ ‘Stay happy,’ she says. ‘That’s an achievement.”
― Caitlin Devlin, The Real Deal

“It was a skill she had that I have never found in anyone else, that ability to make everyone feel included whilst at the same time letting each one of us think that she was singling us out.”
― Caitlin Devlin, The Real Deal

“The way you grew up is allowed to have left a mark on you,’ she says. ‘You don’t have to meet everyone’s individual trauma yardsticks. You feel how you feel. It affects you how it affects you. If it takes a toll on you then it takes a fucking toll on you. No one else’s opinion can change that, as much as they might try.”
― Caitlin Devlin, The Real Deal

“Okay,’ said Faye, tucking her arm under mine in a decided motion, ‘then we’ll stick together. And Kendra can tell us what to expect.’ It was a skill she had that I have never found in anyone else, that ability to make everyone feel included whilst at the same time letting each one of us think that she was singling us out.”
― Caitlin Devlin, The Real Deal

“Reading feels like achieving something. It’s the opposite of wasting time.”
― Caitlin Devlin, The Real Deal

“It’s not a lose-lose. If they tell me I’m bad then you’ll be there to make me feel better, and if they tell me I’m good then you’ll be there to make me feel worse.”
― Caitlin Devlin, The Real Deal

“The way you grew up is allowed to have left a mark on you,’ she says. ‘You don’t have to meet everyone’s individual trauma yardsticks. You feel how you feel. It affects you how it affects you. If it takes a toll on you then it takes a fucking toll on you.”
― Caitlin Devlin, The Real Deal

“It’s hard to go back and wish parts of your life away. It’s like wishing yourself out of existence.”
― Caitlin Devlin, The Real Deal

“It’s just kid stuff,’ he says. ‘Getting knocked down, getting your ego bruised. Being embarrassed or unsure of yourself. I think you forget that sometimes. Some pain is normal.”
― Caitlin Devlin, The Real Deal

“I sometimes feel I’m not built to be known intimately. I don’t think I would hold up upon close inspection. I want to know other people in great detail, to be able to predict every thought and choice and action. I don’t want them to know me at all.”
― Caitlin Devlin, The Real Deal