Chelsea Hodson > Quotes

“Suffering feels religious if you do it right.”
― Chelsea Hodson, Tonight I'm Someone Else: Essays

“I've had enemies so intense that it felt romantic, so mutual it felt like love.”
― Chelsea Hodson, Tonight I'm Someone Else: Essays

“I might be better as an idea, you said, and it was hard not to agree - everyone is better in theory.”
― Chelsea Hodson, Tonight I'm Someone Else: Essays

“What's the end of longing? More longing.

What's the point of longing? To continue.”
― Chelsea Hodson, Tonight I'm Someone Else: Essays

“I alternate between deciding I deserve the world and deciding I deserve nothing.”
― Chelsea Hodson, Tonight I'm Someone Else: Essays

“Think of someone you want to touch whom you cannot touch, someone forbidden. Think of a room where there is nothing except the two of you: still, you cannot touch them. Think of the heat between two hands about to touch, the language that exists in that silence.”

from “A Simple Woman”
― Chelsea Hodson, Tonight I'm Someone Else: Essays

“I once loved so hard I almost lost everything, including his life, including my own. Only then did I realize: perhaps love’s physicality is death itself. I think I was taught that love, in its ideal form, is like a newborn baby: full of possibility, still warm from the heated privacy of the womb. But I think, at the end of my life, I won’t see a figure cloaked in black velvet or a swirling void waiting to take me — I will see the face of love. It will be a recognizable light, the one that lived behind all those other faces I knew up close, the light I suspected but could never prove. When I see the face of love, I won’t be afraid. I will see what I’ve been searching for all my life.”
― Chelsea Hodson, Tonight I'm Someone Else: Essays

“I’m trying to write something so good, so pure, so perfect that I’ll never have to have children; I’ll have created something that can stand in for me, that can live on after me..”
― Chelsea Hodson, Tonight I'm Someone Else: Essays

“I’ve always liked men who look as if they’re from another time.”
― Chelsea Hodson, Tonight I'm Someone Else: Essays

“All characters appearing in this work are you. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely you.”
― Chelsea Hodson, Tonight I'm Someone Else: Essays

“I was so lonely I began regarding my broken heart as the most beautiful thing in my life. Soon after that, it was gone, too.”
― Chelsea Hodson, Tonight I'm Someone Else: Essays

“I told you I was moved to tears by a speech a former president gave. It's not that I love politics or even the president--I just love to be convinced, to be guided into feeling exactly what the speaker wants me to feel. I give myself up to oration, to God, which is you when I let it be,”
― Chelsea Hodson, Tonight I'm Someone Else: Essays

“He slept with his back to me, which made me jealous of his dreams. Hey. Hey. Wake up.”
― Chelsea Hodson, Tonight I'm Someone Else: Essays

“With my eyes closed, I heard him say, I don't love you anymore...I could hear the words but I couldn't quite access them, couldn't quite accept that it was me living my life at that moment. Surely he was telling this to someone else, surely we would be together forever, the way we'd talked about. This was before I needed passion and wildness and to be on the verge of every emotion at once—I wanted safety and beauty, and he looked like Bob Dylan in the middle of the desert, and I thought that was what the love of my life could be.”
― Chelsea Hodson, Tonight I'm Someone Else: Essays

“I return to memories of the people who taught me something, even accidentally. I love them, not for who they are but for the way in which they altered me. In this way, my love for them becomes a love for my own deterioration.”
― Chelsea Hodson, Tonight I'm Someone Else: Essays

“I feared her gaze—she made people feel like the only ones in the room. I wanted to feel fractional.”
― Chelsea Hodson, Pity the Animal

“The only thing worse than hearing your voice at its most desperate is recognizing it.”
― Chelsea Hodson, Tonight I'm Someone Else: Essays

“I'd been trying to turn my life into art, but I wasn't sure what form it should take. I played guitar with half-callused fingers, I found a discarded headboard on the side of the road and tied a hundred rope knots around it. I rented a studio so I could feel like an artist, and that worked for a while. I taped parts of essays to the wall in order to liberate them from my hard drive--to see them as whole. Rearranging them felt good, throwing them away felt even better. I was getting closer to saving only the most rapturous moments of my life. I disposed of memories until everything served me.”
― Chelsea Hodson, Tonight I'm Someone Else: Essays

“When I still lived in Arizona, I sat down on a tattered futon at the house party and my blond friend handed me a bottle of blue Gatorade. There's vodka in it, she said. She was the kind of woman that served drinks at other people's parties. The vodka gave strength to my desires. Everyone watched.

I was the last person to leave the party. As I buttoned my coat, the host of the party touched his beard, laughed, and said, No no no. I wrapped my scarf around my neck, picked up my bike leaning against the living room wall and walked toward the door. Stay, he said, and he wasn't asking.

...Though he did force himself on me, the truth is I stayed at the party waiting for something to happen. Everyone at the party left, and still, nothing had happened. He wasn't a stranger―I knew he was a bad man, I'd known that for a long time. That's why I stayed.

I spent so much of my youth waiting for something to happen. Unsupervised, I had my choice of dark rooms. I knew which rooms were bad and I entered then anyway. It was a sort of power.”
― Chelsea Hodson, Pity the Animal

“There is an island where former versions of myself gallop around on all fours. Untouched, the island populates itself; the versions share what they’ve learned. They never run out of things to talk about by the fire that the latest version knows how to start. If Joseph Delmont came to the island intending to trap a tiger, he might find one. The version might go willingly, without a fight. The island feeds off itself. I wait to be discovered.”
― Chelsea Hodson, Tonight I'm Someone Else: Essays

“There is an island where former versions of myself gallop around on all fours.”
― Chelsea Hodson, Pity the Animal

“I was writing everything down as if I knew what I was seeing. I was pretending to be a neutral observer, but I kept trying to override my heartbreak with poignancy.”
― Chelsea Hodson, Tonight I'm Someone Else: Essays

“Isn't it remarkable the way knowing one person can alter a life? If you're really lucky, you'll find someone who reminds you of yourself. Not the version everyone knows, but the part of yourself you thought you kept hidden: now you see it in him.”
― Chelsea Hodson, Tonight I'm Someone Else: Essays

“I didn't keep a journal then. I was busy, or I thought I was, but mostly I thought anything important would stay with me.”
― Chelsea Hodson, Tonight I'm Someone Else: Essays

“For our high school graduation party, our school hired a hypnotist. My best friend volunteered herself, went onstage, fell asleep, and then he had her dancing and singing Backstreet Boys songs. When she woke up again, she walked back to her seat and I tried to tell her what she'd done while she was out, but she said she was awake the whole time. It was easier to just do what he wanted me to do, she said, and I knew what she meant.”
― Chelsea Hodson, Tonight I'm Someone Else: Essays

“I wished his question was, Wanna know what it's like to be the one who enters? because I do and I wish that knowledge was as simple as holding a man in my hands. I want to see my desire as a protrusion leading me into dark rooms. If I can't have that, then I can attempt to reduce myself to the most vulnerable object possible. Either I await instruction on how to be a dutiful thing or I am the explorer leading this ship or I am a piece of luggage holding other belongings. I take up hardly any space at all.”
― Chelsea Hodson, Pity the Animal

“Bianca had the kind of knowledge other girls could sense in her right away—it was as if she had already lived her adult life and had come back to her thirteen-year-old body to tell us about it.”
― Chelsea Hodson, Tonight I'm Someone Else: Essays

“Back then, I believed in change. I believed scaffolding was the same thing as structure. I thought I could build it.”
― Chelsea Hodson, Tonight I'm Someone Else: Essays

“I want to write sentences so sad that they free me. I can understand why some people still hate me. I live for beginnings.”
― Chelsea Hodson

“Fear breeds fantasy, and I feared my mind would be forgotten.”
― Chelsea Hodson, Pity the Animal