Isabel Banta > Quotes

“What did you want to be?"
"What I am now. I just imagined it differently."
"Different how?"
"I imagined I would be happy.”
― Isabel Banta, Honey

“I run and run and run, and the destination is his praise.”
― Isabel Banta, Honey

“...I finally grasp it - I am inside of my life. This is not a costume I am trying on, this is the skin.”
― Isabel Banta, Honey

“I wasn’t good enough—what a mortifying thing to discover about yourself.”
― Isabel Banta, Honey

“I think parents can affect us without intending to. By being bad examples, they end up helping us. They show us what not to do.”
― Isabel Banta, Honey

“[…] she remains enigmatic, unbreachable; she unlocks herself only for certain people.”
― Isabel Banta, Honey

“Sometimes a song sounds exactly the way you want your life to feel. Sometimes it makes you believe you can change it.”
― Isabel Banta, Honey

“Total abandon. A basic, primal instinct: lose yourself, and you will be found again through release.”
― Isabel Banta, Honey

“My memory is heavy or light, depending on the thickness of the paper. Sometimes ink can't leak through time. Sometimes everything is transparent, as if held up to sunlight.”
― Isabel Banta, Honey

“She decanted her new life into an empty glass, let it breathe, swallowed it. Then poured again.”
― Isabel Banta, Honey

“I remember how, when we first had sex, I was desperate to join myself with him. The lining between our bodies was too thick - I wanted it rubble. First love is ravenous in this way. It's starved. It's consuming the idea of someone until your teeth snap against an unexpected bone.”
― Isabel Banta, Honey

“The truth is my dad was always singing […]”
― Isabel Banta, Honey

“My promise to Gwen to lie low, to be careful, was made by an idea of myself. How many of these do I have? Hundreds. They are stacked inside my head, these paper girls, all patient, selfless, capable of restraint.”
― Isabel Banta, Honey

“In the club, the world is somehow still, and this moment is suspended. All the feeling inside Gwen is curious, sniffing the air and trembling now that it is allowed to wander. So, she takes Tammy’s face into her hands and pulls her close. They collide angrily. She drags her teeth along her jaw, she nips at her earlobes. She’s furious because she wants this night to stretch out endlessly, and she knows it will have to end.”
― Isabel Banta, Honey

“Her friendship was my skeleton - it held me up. It moved my limbs and gave me strength. I wonder if she's sagging with loss, too.”
― Isabel Banta, Honey

“Anyway, it’s fine. My face naturally repels people and it’s fine.” She sounds so sad as she says this. Her beauty is remote, something to observe from a safe distance, as if she’s surrounded by sensors and bulletproof glass.”
― Isabel Banta, Honey

“But America has a way of making its own gods. It revels in it. It lights the bonfire and watches the flames lick the sacrifice.”
― Isabel Banta, Honey

“Sometimes I want to reanimate my own life, but conversely, I also want to return to my mom's womb, to grow fingers and toes all over again. To float in amniotic fluid and warmth. From the safety of this sac, I could decide when to finally emerge again.”
― Isabel Banta, Honey

“Sometimes I feel like I walk around with this haze in front of my eyes. I keep waiting for the day when I’ll wake up and it’ll be clear, and I’ll know exactly what to do and what to say.”
― Isabel Banta, Honey

“And maybe they can see the good sex on me, too. I don't mean the skin I'm displaying - good sex is far subtler. It screws a light bulb tight in your core.”
― Isabel Banta, Honey

“I am twelve again. First time on a plane. My life a steady churn of firsts: period, kiss in a closet, this flight. When did I use up all my beginnings?”
― Isabel Banta, Honey

“Mike wants me to say I’m a normal girl. But I’m not, I never was. I always felt I had to prove I was better.”
― Isabel Banta, Honey

“slut and bitch and whore, even prude. They taste bitter on the tongue, but sweet on release, as long as we aren’t the ones they describe.”
― Isabel Banta, Honey

“It is the whispery part of a sleepover, when eyelids are heavy but we battle to hold them up, because this is when intimacy is really braided between girls.”
― Isabel Banta, HONEY

“I was too young to perceive myself through the world yet, so I gave myself everything I lacked. I was not yet reframed, because I was the frame. I was not in their eyes, because I was the eye.”
― Isabel Banta, Honey

“I’m starting to think no unscathed kid has ever entered this industry. You have to have some emptiness, some cavity that needs filling.”
― Isabel Banta, Honey

“Gwen rests her palm on the surface of the pool. “I couldn’t say it back, so I just lay there as she cried. I just fucking lay there. And I do love her, that’s the thing. But I couldn’t say it, because to tell her would be to release it into the world. You’re the first person I’ve told besides myself.”
― Isabel Banta, Honey

“People say you can’t die in your dreams, but I always do. I die and die and die.”
― Isabel Banta, Honey

“When you are young, these comments stay with you, like footprints left in drying concrete.”
― Isabel Banta, Honey

“I feel every contradiction, every current inside myself. I want this forever. Because when I sing, I feel like I’m returning to the earth, tunneling deep into it, myself at the bottom. And I want to bound across it—feet pounding, heart bursting— until I’ve experienced everything, everything there is to ever be felt.”
― Isabel Banta, Honey