Casey Plett > Quotes

“Who knew, Lizzy thought, the finite amount of nights in her life where she would sleep with her hand around a trusted body. That trusted hers. It wouldn't be a lot, anyway, would it.”
― Casey Plett, A Safe Girl to Love: Stories

“Wendy knew how to deal with looking cis and she knew how to deal with looking trans, but she would never, ever figure out how to be both. How the world could treat her so differently—within days or hours.”
― Casey Plett, Little Fish

“Maybe living through it isn't the only hard part. Maybe being in the world afterward is also the hard part.”
― Casey Plett, Little Fish

“What kind of world does the core of your brain expect that you, you personally get to live in? Wendy wanted to be loved. However easily she might have abandoned or ruined her prospects, Wendy did still believe she would have love.”
― Casey Plett, Little Fish

“No she wasn’t any happier, no she didn’t feel any more like a real girl. But she was calmer now, like a small buzzing part of her brain had been turned off, and was now forever at rest.”
― Casey Plett, Little Fish

“In one LiveJournal group, an intense Buffy the Vampire Slayer devotee illustrated her feelings thus, by caption-parodying that scene where Spike yells at Angel and Buffy: You’re not cis. You’ll never be cis. You’ll be trans ’til it kills you. You’ll fight, and you’ll shag, and you’ll hate yourself ’til it makes you quiver, but you’ll never be cis. Transgenderism isn’t brains, children, it’s blood! Blood screaming inside you to work its will!”
― Casey Plett, A Dream of a Woman

“Once, some friends and I were driving back from partying up there, in the middle of winter, on one of those perfectly clear and freezing nights. It was four in the morning and I was nodding in and out of hammered sleep, my vision mashed potatoes, we stopped so I could throw up at least twice. But as we drove with my face smushed on the window I noticed the field of snow along that stretch of the highway, all still and unmucked with. It looked brushed, almost. Or whipped. Designed. The patterns were the kind you'd see up close in a big rock. Sometimes you see that for far distances out here on the prairie, like a long white-blue sea. It's so gorgeous. And even with my brain's skeleton-crew state, I just thought, man. Everyone calls our part of the world bleak. But it's not bleak. I don't think it's bleak.”
― Casey Plett, A Safe Girl to Love: Stories

“Cis people always have timelines.

I mean, I know not every cis person has that life, but—what are the cis people in my life doing? What are they doing in your life? Versus what the trans people in your life are doing? On a macro level. Ask yourself that.”
― Casey Plett, Little Fish

“What kind of world does the core of your brain expect that you, personally, get to live in?”
― Casey Plett, Little Fish

“She was so, so tired of loving her people and them not loving her back.”
― Casey Plett, Little Fish

“Here, here is my skin that feels like your skin, my muscles and frailties that feel like yours, the lift of your flesh something I intuitively know from my own body, inner maps that, for most of my life, I thought were purely shameful and mine alone. And here, with you, with me, for minutes, for hours, if nothing else—a line from a book Wendy couldn’t remember appeared to her in a slippery ripple of memory—If I loved you, this is how I would love you.”
― Casey Plett, Little Fish

“It exhausts me, it slows me down, it balls me up on the couch with movies and terrible food and it makes me weak. It’s not beautiful or brave or redemptive. It’s like a light case of mono that never goes away. I don’t want to be brave. I want us to be okay.”
― Casey Plett, A Safe Girl to Love: Stories

“Wendy wanted to love this old woman. She was so, so tired of loving her people and them not loving her back. Sometimes this made her angry. And sometimes, like now, she found it spookily easy to put her hurt and baggage on ice.”
― Casey Plett, Little Fish

“We talk about books in language that connotes permanence, solidity, the ability to change worlds and lives. And certainly that's sometimes accurate. But not most of the time. I would even argue an overwhelming majority of the time.

When we talk about books in ways that connote ephemerality, un-lasting-ness, a feeling gone before you can name it, stuff that disappears and doesn't change any worlds, lives...that's what the majority of books do. It's still beautiful. And we kid ourselves, saying otherwise.”
― Casey Plett

“It's like no one wants to dress warm here, Zoe thought. As if because it almost never got cold-cold, people didn't want to turn on heat, put on coats, cover extremities. So they were colder here than they were in places that were actually cold.”
― Casey Plett, A Safe Girl to Love: Stories

“My mother always told me to look in the mirror every morning and say, I am enough. But I do that and I just see an alien. Who looks in the mirror and sees an alien? Do you hear what I'm saying? Am I getting through to you? Please listen to me. Please try to understand.”
― Casey Plett, A Safe Girl to Love: Stories

“I AM A QUEER MUFF-DIVING GLITTER FAGGOT AND PROUD”
― Casey Plett, A Dream of a Woman

“Every now and then, I realize that it’s been months since I’ve been touched. I can’t tell you how dark it feels. When I can’t be alone in my apartment anymore, I walk the riverside and the streets and the campus in my neighbourhood, and the quiet feels like it’s going to kill me. Yes, sometimes there are people, and sometimes they’re even with each other, and sometimes I can even see their faces—but that’s worse, somehow. Because there’s such an undeniable reason underlying the fact that I cannot get close to them. In the sickest, most awful way, it feels like being a teenager again. All these strangers, they have lives and they’re going on without you and what you can do is nothing, nothing, nothing but walk alone and sit in your room. Supposedly, one day, life will be different, but how does that mean anything and how can you believe that? The strangers say they’re feeling the same way. I know I should believe they are.”
― Casey Plett, A Dream of a Woman

“Every now and then, I realize that it's been months since I've been touched. I can't tell you how dark it feels. When I can't be alone in my apartment anymore, I walk the riverside and the streets and the campus in my neighborhood, and the quiet feels like it's going to kill me. Yes, sometimes there are people, and sometimes they're even with each other, and sometimes I can even see their faces - but that's worse, somehow. Because there's such an undeniable reason underlying the fact that I cannot get close to them. In the sickest, most awful way, it feels like being a teenager again. All these strangers, they have lives and they're going on without you and what you can do is nothing, nothing, nothing but walk alone and sit in your room. Supposedly, one day, life will be different, but how does that mean anything and how can you believe that? The strangers say they're feeling the same way. I know I should believe they are.”
― Casey Plett, A Dream of a Woman

“Loud sex is allowed in this house.”
― Casey Plett, A Dream of a Woman

“Loud sex is allowed in this house,”
― Casey Plett, A Dream of a Woman