ecroot > ecroot's Quotes

“The mother I've always wanted isn't real; she's a dream. And not every dream comes true.”
― Akemi Dawn Bowman, Starfish

“I'm too busy crying myself, thinking of how it must feel to be loved so wholly, so unconditionally.”
― Akemi Dawn Bowman, Starfish

“If I didn't define myself for myself, I would be crunched into other people's fantasies for me and eaten alive.”
― Audre Lorde

“But I don't need an apology. Not anymore. I have my whole life ahead of me - there isn't room in it for anger about things I don't have the power to change. I've mourned the loss of the mother I imagined could exist. I accept the one I have will never be the one I need.
And that's okay - because I will be the person I need. I will be the one I can depend on, the one who has the power to make my life better or worse.
I'll still panic when I'm in a crowd. I'll still question whether people mean something different from what they say. And I'll probably always feel my heart thump when I think someone is criticizing me.
But I can live with that.
I accept myself.”
― Akemi Dawn Bowman, Starfish

“If you want to help her, you need to help yourself first. No one serves their friends by grinding themselves into dust on the altar of compassion.”
― Seanan McGuire, In an Absent Dream

“I want to get away. I want to start over, so I can figure out who I really am and where I fit into the world.”
― Akemi Dawn Bowman, Starfish

“But I feel like I've spent most of my life wishing for someone else's approval, or relying on their reassurance that I'm living my life the right way. And somewhere along the way, I forgot to care what I thought about myself.

I feel trapped beneath all the things that make me think less of myself. If my life were a video game, I would have hit the reset button a long time ago.”
― Akemi Dawn Bowman, Starfish

“Blood is thicker than water, but family isn’t just about blood. Family is about faith, and loyalty, and who you love. If you don’t have those things, I don’t care what the blood says. You’re not family.”
― Seanan McGuire, Midnight Blue-Light Special

“The painting isn't about the starfish. It's about the girl who wants to venture out into the ocean, away from the starfish, so she can feel like she matters.”
― Akemi Dawn Bowman, Starfish

“There is kindness in the world, if we know how to look for it. If we never start denying it the door.”
― Seanan McGuire, Beneath the Sugar Sky

“Hope means you keep on holding to things that won't ever be so again, and so you bleed an inch at a time until there's nothing left.”
― Seanan McGuire, Every Heart a Doorway

“I want to find self-worth without needing it to come from someone's approval.”
― Akemi Dawn Bowman, Starfish

“We all have to dream our own dreams. We only get one life to live—live it for yourself, not anyone else.”
― Akemi Dawn Bowman, Starfish

“And maybe that’s like life. You live for a moment—one single moment. And then you don’t matter. Because there are years of the past and years of the future, and we’re all simply one tiny blip in time—a surge of water waiting to leave our mark on the sand, only to have it washed away by the waves that come after us. And Lea, with her brief, tiny wave. She didn’t get to make a mark. If she’d had more time, she would have been a hurricane.”
― Akemi Dawn Bowman, Summer Bird Blue

“tired of wishing I were someone else and tired of feeling like everyone expects me to be someone else”
― Akemi Dawn Bowman, Starfish

“Your silence will not protect you.”
― Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches

“Don't live to please the starfish, especially when their happiness is at the expense of yours. That is not love. That is narcissism. There's an entire ocean out there, Kiko--swim in it.”
― Akemi Dawn Bowman, Starfish

“He doesn't wear his heart on his sleeve; he keeps it in a locked box with all of his dreams and expressions because he doesn't want to share them with the rest of the world.”
― Akemi Dawn Bowman, Starfish

“Dance, when you're broken open. Dance, if you've torn the bandage off. Dance in the middle of the fighting. Dance in your blood. Dance when you're perfectly free.”
― Rumi

“I'd prefer if she just didn't affect me anymore. I'd prefer if I hardly had to think about her at all. Not because I hate her or anything, because I don't. But thinking about her hurts me; talking about how she makes me feel hurts me.

What I want is for the hurt to stop. I want a mother who thinks more of me than she does. Who recognizes that I'm a better person than the version of me she has in her head. I just want her to know me, and be interested in me, and care about me without it being because she thinks she's supposed to.”
― Akemi Dawn Bowman, Starfish

“Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.”
― audre lorde

“and when we speak we are afraid
our words will not be heard
nor welcomed
but when we are silent
we are still afraid
So it is better to speak
remembering
we were never meant to survive”
― Audre Lorde, The Black Unicorn: Poems

“If I can't figure out how to live on my own–how to do things on my own–how am I supposed to live at all?”
― Akemi Dawn Bowman, Starfish

“trying to think of a way to change my future so it stops feeling like an empty hallway that stretches forever and ever.”
― Akemi Dawn Bowman, Starfish

“I need to be strong enough to move away on my own, to pull Mom's hooks out of my heart, to forget about Uncle Max. I need to be strong enough to carry all the guilt of what happened to my family because of me.”
― Akemi Dawn Bowman, Starfish

“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.”
― James Baldwin

“You’re nobody’s doorway but your own, and the only one who gets to tell you how your story ends is you.”
― Seanan McGuire, Every Heart a Doorway

“You're nobody's rainbow.
You're nobody's princess.
You're nobody's doorway but your own, and the only one who gets to tell you how your story ends is you.”
― Seanan mcguire , Every Heart a Doorway

“It was not a triumphal return. Home, as I had known it, was gone.”
― Alison Bechdel, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic

“For us, places we went were home. We didn't care if they were good or evil or neutral or what. We cared about the fact that for the first time, we didn't have to pretend to be something we weren't. We just got to be. That made all the difference in the world.”
― Seanan McGuire, Every Heart a Doorway