Kayla Burton > Kayla's Quotes

“The excuses we make for them are outrageous, but they’re nothing compared with the ones we make for ourselves.”
― Kate Elizabeth Russell, My Dark Vanessa

“It’s strange to know that whenever I remember myself at fifteen, I’ll think of this.”
― Kate Elizabeth Russell, My Dark Vanessa

“This, I think, is the cost of telling, even in the guise of fiction. Once you do, it’s the only thing about you anyone will ever care about. It defines you whether you want it to or not.”
― Kate Elizabeth Russell, My Dark Vanessa

“My worst habit, according to my mother, is how I deflect compliments with self-deprecation. I need to learn how to accept praise. It boils down to confidence, she says, or lack thereof.”
― Kate Elizabeth Russell, My Dark Vanessa

“No, not crazy,” Ruby says. “Traumatized.”
― Kate Elizabeth Russell, My Dark Vanessa

“people keep saying, that you need to speak out no matter the cost.” “No,” she says firmly. “That’s wrong. It’s a dangerous amount of pressure to put on someone dealing with trauma.” “Then why do they keep saying it? Because it’s not just this journalist. It’s every woman who comes forward. But if someone doesn’t want to come forward and tell the world every bad thing that’s happened to her, then she’s what? Weak? Selfish?” I throw up my hand, wave it away. “The whole thing is bullshit.”
― Kate Elizabeth Russell, My Dark Vanessa

“I don't remember, not exactly. So many of my memories from back then are shadowy, incomplete. I need him to fill in the gaps, though sometimes the girl he describes sounds like a stranger.”
― Kate Elizabeth Russell, My Dark Vanessa

“How easy it is to be tricked into building a narrative out of air. Out of nothing.”
― Kate Elizabeth Russell, My Dark Vanessa

“I'm unhuman now. Untethered.”
― Kate Elizabeth Russell, My Dark Vanessa

“You see, doing one thing differently is very often the same as doing everything differently.”
― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library

“To be human was to continually dumb the world down into an understandable story that keeps things simple.”
― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library

“We only know what we perceive. Everything we experience is ultimately just our perception of it. “It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.”’ ‘You know Thoreau?”
― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library

“She realised that she hadn’t tried to end her life because she was miserable, but because she had managed to convince herself that there was no way out of her misery.”
― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library

“Manic-depression distorts moods and thoughts, incites dreadful behaviors, destroys the basis of rational thought, and too often erodes the desire and will to live. It is an illness that is biological in its origins, yet one that feels psychological in the experience of it; an illness that is unique in conferring advantage and pleasure, yet one that brings in its wake almost unendurable suffering and, not infrequently, suicide.”
― Kay Redfield Jamison, An Unquiet Mind

“But it has been precisely that persevering steadiness of my mother, her belief in seeing things through, and her great ability to love and learn, listen and change, that helped keep me alive through all of the years of pain and nightmare that were to come.”
― Kay Redfield Jamison, An Unquiet Mind

“Others imply that they know what it is like to be depressed because they have gone through a divorce, lost a job, or broken up with someone. But these experiences carry with them feelings. Depression, instead, is flat, hollow, and unendurable. It is also tiresome. People cannot abide being around you when you are depressed. They might think that they ought to, and they might even try, but you know and they know that you are tedious beyond belief: you are irritable and paranoid and humorless and lifeless and critical and demanding and no reassurance is ever enough. You're frightened, and you're frightening, and you're "not at all like yourself but will be soon," but you know you won't.”
― Kay Redfield Jamison, An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness

“I compare myself with my former self, not with others. Not only that, I tend to compare my current self with the best I have been, which is when I have been midly manic. When I am my present "normal" self, I am far removed from when I have been my liveliest, most productive, most intense, most outgoing and effervescent. In short, for myself, I am a hard act to follow.”
― Kay Redfield Jamison, An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness

“It may be the wrong decision, but fuck it, it's mine.”
― Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves

“Some people reflect light, some deflect it, you by some miracle, seem to collect it.”
― Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves

“...and there you have it, another body on the floor surrounded by things that don't mean much to anyone except to the one who can't take any of them along. ”
― Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves

“I write only because
There is a voice within me
That will not be still”
― Sylvia Plath, Letters Home

“Eternity bores me,
I never wanted it.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Collected Poems