Kelsey > Kelsey's Quotes

“I don’t belong here. I know that. But I don’t belong anywhere else, either. And that is at the heart of the black depression pressing down on me, flattening me. I have no place. No home. Sex, but no real affection. I am kept, but not cherished.”
― Ellen Hopkins, Tricks

“Eyes Tell Stories
But do they know how
to craft fiction? Do
they know how to spin
lies?
His eyes swear forever,
flatter with vows of only
me. But are they empty
promises?
I stare into his eyes, as
into a crystal ball, but
I cannot find forever,
only
movies of yesterday,
a sketchbook of today,
dreams of a shared
tomorrow.
His eyes whisper secrets.
But are they truths or fairy tales?
I wonder if even he
knows.”
― Ellen Hopkins, Tricks

“When all choice is taken from you, life becomes a game of survival.”
― Ellen Hopkins, Tricks

“Hell isn’t some fiery pit “down there.” It’s right here on Earth, in every dirty city, every yawning town.”
― Ellen Hopkins, Tricks

“When You Weren’t Looking The child became a woman, though she wasn’t ready to. Don’t ask how or why. Those questions are not important ones. Can’t you see you didn’t care enough to notice?”
― Ellen Hopkins, Tricks

“Home

...Home.
...the word,
...has
...no
...meaning”
― Ellen Hopkins, Tricks

“Faces

...I
...don't
...know
...the real
...me”
― Ellen Hopkins, Tricks

“Even without them touching me, I feel dirty about what I do. Alex does even filthier things but says it all washes off with soap. I don’t believe that. I think it all leaves stains. Indelible stains.”
― Ellen Hopkins, Tricks

“never believed in demons or monsters lurking under my bed. But lately I’ve started to wonder if evil hasn’t in fact infiltrated this world, slithering streets and sidewalks, wearing what- ever disguise suits its immediate purpose. When a choirboy is molested, is it by the devil in a priest costume? Or does Satan play a more clever game to get what he wants? To win the contest, accomplish his goals, might the prince of hatred mask himself as love?”
― Ellen Hopkins, Tricks

“How many kinds of weirdos are there?” She doesn’t laugh. Lots. And the worst are the ones you don’t suspect. They’re the ones you invite inside your front door.”
― Ellen Hopkins, Tricks

“I have been smashed and put back together so many times nothing works right. Nothing is where it should be, heavy thumping in my shoulder where my heart now beats.”
― Elizabeth Scott, Living Dead Girl

“Three life lessons:
1.No one will see you.
2.No one will say anything.
3.No one will save you.”
― Elizabeth Scott, Living Dead Girl

“Little Alice, all hollowed out, so easy to smash into a million little pieces.”
― Elizabeth Scott, Living Dead Girl

“Because maybe it would be better if we all got apologized to first. Maybe it would hurt less, expecting to be hurt.”
― Courtney Summers, All the Rage

“I hated labels anyway. People didn't fit in slots--prostitute, housewife, saint--like sorting the mail. We were so mutable, fluid with fear and desire, ideals and angles, changeable as water.”
― Janet Fitch, White Oleander

“Yet not for a single moment did I have any doubts about my own integrity and honour as a woman. I knew that my profession had been invented by men, and that men were in control of both our worlds, the one on earth, and the one in heaven. That men force women to sell their bodies at a price, and that the lowest paid body is that of a wife. All women are prostitutes of one kind or another.”
― Nawal El Saadawi, Woman at Point Zero

“Men only treat women like princesses when they want to use them like prostitutes.”
― Bauvard, Some Inspiration for the Overenthusiastic

“I think it's better to be comfortable in your skin than to be miserable being who you are. Sure, the meth is horrible. It ruins people from the inside out. It's a waiting game --- it's not a matter of if it destroys you, but rather a matter of when it will. I've made it this far. I'm not sending a message that it's "cool" to be on drugs and tell everyone about it. I don't sum myself up as a drug addict and a hooker. That's not what I am. Those are juts things I do, they don't define me. Jobs and addictions do not make us who we are.”
― Ashly Lorenzana

“In his student days, he used to argue that if a woman has no other course open to her but starvation, prostitution, or throwing herself from a bridge, then surely the prostitute, who has shown the most tenacious instinct for self-preservation, should be considered stronger and saner than her frailer and no longer living sisters. One couldn't have it both ways, he'd pointed out: if women are seduced and abandoned they're supposed to go mad, but if they survive, and seduce in their turn, then they were mad to begin with.”
― Margaret Atwood, Alias Grace

“Once you are defiled, you can't get back your purity by any means, instead, you will only look for ways to be defiled over and over again.”
― Michael Bassey Johnson

“When basic human needs are ignored, rejected, or invalidated by those in roles and positions to appropriately meet them; when the means by which these needs have been previously met are no longer available: and when prior abuse has already left one vulnerable for being exploited further, the stage is set for the possibility these needs will be prostituted. This situation places a survivor who has unmet needs in an incredible dilemma. She can either do without or seek the satisfaction of mobilized needs through some "illegitimate" source that leaves her increasingly divided from herself and ostracized from others.

While meeting needs in this way resolves the immediate existential experience of deprivation and abandonment. it produces numerous other difficulties. These include experiencing oneself as “bad” or "weak" for having such strong needs; experiencing shame and guilt for relying on “illegitimate” sources of satisfaction: experiencing a loss of self-respect for indulging in activities contrary to personal moral standards of conduct; risking the displeasure and misunderstanding of others important to her; and opening oneself to the continued abuse and victimization of perpetrators who are all too willing to selfishly use others for their own pleasure and purposes under the guise of being 'helpful.”
― J. Jeffrey Means

“I have absolutely no pleasure in the stimulants in which I sometimes so madly indulge. It has not been in the pursuit of pleasure that I have periled life and reputation and reason. It has been the desperate attempt to escape from torturing memories, from a sense of insupportable loneliness and a dread of some strange impending doom.”
― Edgar Allan Poe

“You can’t walk away from someone you love, leave them drowning in your desertion. If love has no more meaning than that, you can keep it. I don’t want it now or ever again. Don’t want to hear the word or wear its scars.”
― Ellen Hopkins, Tricks

“Have to Find

...life
...is
...a—
...gamble
...after
...all.”
― Ellen Hopkins, Tricks

“I told her about the man, not my daddy, she said, He was only making you into a real girl. I didn’t understand. But I made myself believe her. I was a real girl now. But what was I before?”
― Ellen Hopkins, Tricks

“Religion is for followers... Followers and puppets.”
― Ellen Hopkins, Tricks

“The best thing about my mom being such
a bitch is not worrying
about trying to make her
proud of me.”
― Ellen Hopkins, Tricks

“Another day, a different hour, take a left and not a right, you'd wind up a whole different being. Knowing if that would be better requires a realm of experience only decades can build.”
― Ellen Hopkins, Tricks

“Eyes closed, we can/be anywhere. Italy. France. Australia./Jupiter. Hell. Doesn't matter, as long/as we're not here. As long as we can pretend we're still pretty.”
― Ellen Hopkins, Tricks

“Madness is too glamorous a term to convey what happens to most people who are losing their minds. That word is too exciting, too literary, too interesting in its connotations, to convey the boredom, the slowness, the dreariness, the dampness of depression…depression is pure dullness, tedium straight up. Depression is, especially these days, an overused term to be sure, but never one associated with anything wild, anything about dancing all night with a lampshade on your head and then going home and killing yourself…The word madness allows its users to celebrate the pain of its sufferers, to forget that underneath all the acting-out and quests for fabulousness and fine poetry, there is a person in huge amounts of dull, ugly agony...Remember that when you’re at the point at which you’re doing something as desperate and violent as sticking your head in an oven, it is only because the life that preceded this act felt even worse. Think about living in depression from moment to moment, and know it is not worth any of the great art that comes as its by-product.”
― Elizabeth Wurtzel, Prozac Nation: Young and Depressed in America