Dot Hutchison > Quotes

“Some people stay broken. Some pick up the pieces and put them back together with all the sharp edges showing.”
― Dot Hutchison, The Butterfly Garden

“I think a trauma doesn’t stop just because you’ve been rescued.”
― Dot Hutchison, The Butterfly Garden

“Not making a choice is a choice. Neutrality is a concept, not a fact.”
― Dot Hutchison, The Butterfly Garden

“What choice are you making, Desmond?”
“I don’t think I’m making any choice right now.”
“Then you’re automatically making the wrong ones.” He straightened, mouth open to protest, but I held up my hand. “Not making a choice is a choice. Neutrality is a concept, not a fact. No one actually gets to live their lives that way.”
― Dot Hutchison, The Butterfly Garden

“Beauty loses its meaning when you’re surrounded by too much of it.”
― Dot Hutchison, The Butterfly Garden

“My secrets are old friends; I would feel like a poor friend if I abandoned them now.”
― Dot Hutchison, The Butterfly Garden

“Listen to what isn’t being said.”
― Dot Hutchison, The Butterfly Garden

“I’m not a fake person; I’m carefully and genuinely handcrafted.”
― Dot Hutchison, The Butterfly Garden

“The trouble with sociopaths, really, is that you never know where they draw their boundaries.”
― Dot Hutchison, The Butterfly Garden

“Some wanted the freedom to be anyone they wanted, some of us wanted the freedom to be left alone.”
― Dot Hutchison, The Butterfly Garden

“And that stupid little girl stood in the winter and kept lighting matches to catch glimpses of families that weren’t—could never be—hers and froze to death in those harsh moments of reality between matches, because even though matches can burn, they’re light, not heat.”
― Dot Hutchison, The Butterfly Garden

“You seem to have this strange image of me as a lost child, like I’ve just been thrown on the side of the road like garbage, or roadkill, but kids like me? We’re not lost. We may be the only ones who never are. We always know exactly where we are and where we can go. And where we can’t.”
― Dot Hutchison, The Butterfly Garden

“Scars mean we survived something, even when the wounds still hurt.”
― Dot Hutchison, The Summer Children

“Sometimes you can look at a wedding and realize with a certain sense of resignation that any children produced in that marriage will inevitably be fucked up and fucked over. It’s a fact, not a sense of foreboding so much as a grim acceptance that these two people should not—but definitely will—reproduce.”
― Dot Hutchison, The Butterfly Garden

“If you don’t look at the bad thing, the bad thing can’t see you, right?”
― Dot Hutchison, The Butterfly Garden

“The gifts we give say as much about us as the gifts we get and keep,”
― Dot Hutchison, The Butterfly Garden

“I’m constitutionally incapable of trusting people who treat their books that badly.”
― Dot Hutchison, Roses of May

“If you’ve seen enough, you just look older, no matter what the rest of your face looks like.”
― Dot Hutchison, The Butterfly Garden

“Our choices make us who we are,”
― Dot Hutchison, The Butterfly Garden

“Let's call me a shadow child, overlooked rather than broken. I'm the teddy bear gathering dust bunnies under the bed, not the one-legged soldier.”
― Dot Hutchison, The Butterfly Garden

“And promises, once made, must be kept, and if later you regret them, you should have been more careful in making them.”
― Dot Hutchison, A Wounded Name

“How do you put yourself back together when the pieces permanently lost are the only reasons anyone's looking at you?”
― Dot Hutchison, Roses of May

“So not only was I self-sufficient, I came to have a pretty low opinion of most people’s intelligence.”
― Dot Hutchison, The Butterfly Garden

“It isn't impossible to heal from that, but it leaves scars. It changes the way you look at people, how far you can trust or let people in. It changes your habits, even your desires and dreams. It changes who you are, and no matter how much you struggle back toward that place, that person you started as, you never actually get there. Some change is irreversible.”
― Dot Hutchison, The Summer Children

“We shouldn’t have to fix ourselves if we don’t want to. We shouldn’t have to be strong or brave or hopeful or any such bullshit. Mum has always emphatically stated that it’s okay to not be okay. We don’t owe that to anyone else.”
― Dot Hutchison, Roses of May

“A promise is a rope around the neck.”
― Dot Hutchison, A Wounded Name

“The carousel’s over now,” he tells her quietly. “This time your family is waiting for you.”
― Dot Hutchison, The Butterfly Garden

“What wasn’t known was created, what wasn’t created eventually ceased to matter.”
― Dot Hutchison, The Butterfly Garden

“In terror she spoke, letting sink her wings till they trailed in the dust—in agony sobbed, letting sink her plumes till they trailed in the dust—till they sorrowfully trailed in the dust. But my wings couldn’t move and I couldn’t fly, and I couldn’t even cry. All that was left to me was the terror and the agony and the sorrow.”
― Dot Hutchison, The Butterfly Garden

“it’s okay to not be okay.”
― Dot Hutchison, Roses of May