Hannah Lee > Hannah's Quotes

“The way I see it, being dead is not terribly far off from being on a cruise ship. Most of your time is spent lying on your back. The brain has shut down. The flesh begins to soften. Nothing much new happens, and nothing is expected of you.”
― Mary Roach, Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers

“Life contains these things: leakage and wickage and discharge, pus and snot and slime and gleet. We are biology. We are reminded of this at the beginning and the end, at birth and at death. In between we do what we can to forget.”
― Mary Roach, Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers

“In this moment I resolve to kiss my husband with an open mouth forever. I want to freeze him the way I see him in this instant: dark eyebrows, sexy, sleepy hair and sleepy eyes. But we can't freeze the way that we see the people we love, as much as we would wish. I know that I will kiss my husband with a closed mouth again, at some point. I know that I will even kiss him with a closed heart.

I pray for our love. I pray that even if I kiss my husband with a closed heart, my heart opens again to him. When I desire my husband. I am grateful to desire my husband. What can we hope for in a marriage but to keep seeing things anew? With the people we love, it is so easy to stop seeing them at all.”
― Melissa Broder, So Sad Today: Personal Essays

“I am giving you permission to tell the truth about where you are in your process of dismantling your fucked-up schemas. I am not pressuring you to dismantle anything. I am saying let’s be here together, undismantled, and just accept that this is where we are. Let’s love each other right where we are, even as we compare ourselves to one another. I am saying, yes, baby, I know it’s hard.”
― Melissa Broder, So Sad Today: Personal Essays

“I sanctify the ground and say fuck it
I say fuck it in a way that does not invite death
I say fuck it and fall down no new holes
And I ride an unwinged horse
And I unbecome myself
And I strip my poison suit
And wear my crown of fuck its”
― Melissa Broder, Poetry Foundation Magazine, December 2014

“Bringing a child into the world without its consent seems unethical. Leaving the womb just seems insane. The womb is nirvana. It’s tripping in an eternal orb outside the space-time continuum. It’s a warm, wet rave at the center of the earth, but you’re the only raver. There’s no weird New Age guide. There’s no shitty techno. There’s only you and the infinite.”
― Melissa Broder, So Sad Today: Personal Essays

“An external attribution exists to make you feel less shitty. It’s a handy tool, wherein you perceive anything positive that happens to you as a mistake, subjective, and/or never a result of your own goodness. Negative things, alternately, are the objective truth. And they’re always your fault.”
― Melissa Broder, So Sad Today: Personal Essays

“In the context of food and consumption, too-muchness translates into not-enoughness: your appetites are too big for the planet, and therefore, you probably shouldn’t be here.”
― Melissa Broder, So Sad Today: Personal Essays

“There aren’t many ways to find comfort in this world. We must take it where we can get it, even in the darkest, most disgusting places. Nobody asks to be born. No one signs a form that says, You have my permission to make me exist. Babies are born, because parents feel that they themselves are not enough. So, parents, never condemn us for trying to fill our existential holes, when we are but the fruit of your own vain attempts to fill yours. It’s your fault we’re here to deal with the void in the first place.”
― Melissa Broder, So Sad Today: Personal Essays

“I also remember, having been fucked up every day for years, that the world seemed like such a novelty to me during my first few years sober. Like, I remember going through each of the seasons and the magic of rediscovering what it felt like to be in the world: going to a pumpkin patch on Halloween, getting a tree for Christmas, I felt excited by reality in a way that I never had before. I actually wanted to be alive.”
― Melissa Broder, So Sad Today: Personal Essays

“I am a superficial woman of depth.”
― Melissa Broder, So Sad Today: Personal Essays

“What I have sought in love is a reprieve from the itch of consciousness -- to transcend myself and my human imperfections -- but this has yet to happen.”
― Melissa Broder, So Sad Today: Personal Essays

“Just saw two ants drown together in my bathtub and it reminded me of us: a love story.”
― Melissa Broder, So Sad Today: Personal Essays

“I wanted to build a fire with our shadow selves and burn there or be erased by the narcotic of limerence when I turned your face into a fire: a love story.”
― Melissa Broder, So Sad Today: Personal Essays

“In the dark you looked so human in your skin that I called you human in my head and didn’t want you then and felt relieved: a love story.”
― Melissa Broder, So Sad Today: Personal Essays

“I feel like my life has a lot of caves and they are all filled with your hair: a love story.”
― Melissa Broder, So Sad Today: Personal Essays

“Sometimes when I need to comfort myself (all the time) I think about your lisp and it creates a wombskin around my brain full of barbituratesque nectar, the side effects of which include a horny surge in my second chakra and pussy, and then severe withdrawal: a love story.”
― Melissa Broder, So Sad Today: Personal Essays

“Maybe we do better when we see each other simply as beloveds.”
― Melissa Broder, So Sad Today: Personal Essays

“Weather, she thinks, is impartial. You don’t need to be principled to enjoy a breezy day like this. You merely have to be alive.”
― Amy Koppelman, I Smile Back

“You know what happens when you feed the birds? They forget to fly south and freeze to death.”
― Amy Koppelman, I Smile Back

“Desperation, not desire, is the root of atrocity.”
― Amy Koppelman, I Smile Back

“There are people like that, people who don’t beat themselves up, don’t take every little injustice personally. Those people, same callous fuckers that walk past a legless guy without a pause, those are the ones who win.”
― Amy Koppelman, I Smile Back

“Death is a manifestation, the complete and total embodiment of fear.”
― Amy Koppelman, I Smile Back

“There is the world as it exists, and then, just next to it, the world one creates in order to exist. The boundaries limited only by one’s imagination.”
― Amy Koppelman, I Smile Back

“If depression is darkness, then the child of depression grows up living in the shadow of that darkness. What we inherit - indiscriminate.”
― Amy Koppelman, I Smile Back

“People just don’t get it. Appearance is arbitrary. And if it’s not arbitrary the it’s compensation. Pretty face, ugly heart. Either way, it’s not something earned.”
― Amy Koppelman, I Smile Back

“If the castle is hope, memory is the moat that surrounds it.”
― Amy Koppelman, I Smile Back

“Happiness,Laney's sure,is somehow related to the rapidity in which one is able to implement denial.”
― Amy Koppleman

“Regret vivid and whole is an afterthought.”
― Amy Koppleman

“Although we usually fail to think of it in this way, the world around us today is just one of countless possible worlds. The millions of species of plants, animals, and insects we see around us are the expression of myriad interacting processes, including chance -- perhaps especially chance. At any point in its prehistory, a species might just easily have taken a different direction, given a slightly altered confluence of events, thus leaving today’s world a slightly different place.”
― Paula Bomer, Inside Madeleine