L > L's Quotes

“Make something beautiful of your life.”
― Abraham Verghese, Cutting for Stone

“Wasn't that the definition of home? Not where you are from, but where you are wanted”
― Abraham Verghese, Cutting for Stone

“You live it forward, but understand it backward.”
― Abraham Verghese, Cutting for Stone

“Not only our actions, but also our omissions, become our destiny.”
― Abraham Verghese, Cutting for Stone

“I know exactly how that is. To love somebody who doesn’t deserve it. Because they are all you have. Because any attention is better than no attention. For exactly the same reason, it is sometimes satisfying to cut yourself and bleed. On those gray days where eight in the morning looks no different from noon and nothing has happened and nothing is going to happen and you are washing a glass in the sink and it breaks-accidentally-and punctures your skin. And then there is this shocking red, the brightest thing in the day, so vibrant it buzzes, this blood of yours. That is okay sometimes because at least you know you’re alive.”
― Augusten Burroughs, Running with Scissors

“I will no longer mutilate and destroy myself in order to find a secret behind the ruins.”
― Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha

“I am not "cured"--I know I never will be. I will always crave that pain to keep me centered. I will always be just a little astounded when I get through a crisis without putting a blade to my flesh.”
― J. Kenner, Complete Me

“Madlen. Would a person ever cut himself," she said, "on purpose?"
...
Then she paused, looking quite grim. "There are no limits to the ways people you think you know can astonish you. I can't explain the practice to you, Lady Queen. I wonder if it's meant to be punishment for something one can't forgive oneself for. Or an external expression, Lady Queen, of an internal pain? Or perhaps it's a way to realize that you actually do want to say alive.”
― Kristin Cashore, Bitterblue

“In case you didn't know, dead people don't bleed. If you can bleed-see it, feel it-then you know you're alive. It's irrefutable, undeniable proof. Sometimes I just need a little reminder.”
― Amy Efaw, After

“People should know about us. Girls who write their pain on their bodies. ~Louisa”
― Kathleen Glasgow, Girl in Pieces

“I just let the pain take over, allowing it to numb the pain of being left behind.”
― Jessica Sorensen, The Coincidence of Callie & Kayden

“I just want to feel better. My own body is my deepest enemy. It wants, it wants, it wants and when it does not get, it cries and cries and I punish it. How can you live in fear of your own body?”
― Kathleen Glasgow, Girl in Pieces

“The fear of an unknown never resolves, because the unknown expands infinitely outward, leaving you to cling pitifully to any small shelter of the known: a cracker has twelve calories; the skin, when cut, bleeds.”
― Caroline Kettlewell, Skin Game

“When the black thing was at its worst, when the illicit cocktails and the ten-mile runs stopped working, I would feel numb as if dead to the world. I moved unconsciously, with heavy limbs, like a zombie from a horror film. I felt a pain so fierce and persistent deep inside me, I was tempted to take the chopping knife in the kitchen and cut the black thing out I would lie on my bed staring at the ceiling thinking about that knife and using all my limited powers of self-control to stop myself from going downstairs to get it.”
― Alice Jamieson, Today I'm Alice: Nine Personalities, One Tortured Mind

“If a heart could fail in its pumping, a lung in its breathing, then why not a brain in its thinking, rendering the world forever askew, like a television with bad reception? And couldn't a brain fail as arbitrarily as any one of these other parts, without regard to the blessing and cosseting that, everyone was so eager to remind you, disentitled you from unhappiness?”
― Caroline Kettlewell, Skin Game

“I decry the injustice of my wounds, only to look down and see that I am holding a smoking gun in one hand and a fistful of ammunition in the other.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough