Elise > Elise's Quotes

“You never come back, not all the way. Always there is an odd distance between you and the people you love and the people you meet, a barrier thin as the glass of a mirror, you never come all the way out of the mirror; you stand, for the rest of your life, with one foot in this world and no one in another, where everything is upside down and backward and sad.”
― Marya Hornbacher, Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia

“There is never a sudden revelation, a complete and tidy explanation for why it happened, or why it ends, or why or who you are. You want one and I want one, but there isn't one. It comes in bits and pieces, and you stitch them together wherever they fit, and when you are done you hold yourself up, and still there are holes and you are a rag doll, invented, imperfect. And yet you are all that you have, so you must be enough. There is no other way.”
― Marya Hornbacher, Wasted : A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia

“I breathe in slowly. Food is life. I exhale, take another breath. Food is life. And that's the problem. When you're alive, people can hurt you. It's easier to crawl into a bone cage or a snowdrift of confusion. It's easier to lock everybody out.
But it's a lie.”
― Laurie Halse Anderson, Wintergirls

“Smoke gunpowder and go to school to jump through hoops, sit up and beg, and roll over on command. Listen to the whispers that curl into your head at night, calling you ugly and fat and stupid and bitch and whore and worst of all "a disappointment." Puke and starve and cut and drink because you don't want to feel any of this.”
― Laurie Halse Anderson, Wintergirls

“I'm not strange, weird, off, nor crazy, my reality is just different from yours.”
― Lewis Carroll

“I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart. I am, I am, I am.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“Is there no way out of the mind?”
― Sylvia Plath

“There was a certain luxury to charity that she could not identify with and did not have. To take "charity" for granted, to revel in this charity towards people whom one did not know—perhaps it came from having had a yesterday and having today and expecting to have tomorrow. She envied them this. ...Ifemelu wanted, suddenly and desperately, to be from the country of people who gave and not those who received, to be one of those who had and could therefore bask in the grace of having given. To be among those who could afford copious pity and empathy.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah

“Something is lost, but a person does not know what it is; this feeling is indescribable in words, and therefore, it can be experienced only as the emptiness.”
― Karin Johannisson, Melankoliska rum: Om ångest, leda och sårbarhet i förfluten tid och nutid

“Folk gråter för litet, visste de hur mycket de borde gråta skulle de aldrig sluta, börjar man gråta finns det inget slut på det.”
― Bodil Malmsten

“Jag skriver inte för att jag kan det, för att jag tycker det är lätt, jag gör det för att det är vad jag gör och skriver jag inte, mår jag inte bra. Jag är en som skriver och skriver jag inte, finns jag inte, är jag inte jag. Jag blir inte lycklig av att skriva, ibland är jag lycklig när jag skriver, men då vet jag inte om det; då är jag så inne i skrivandet att skrivandet är det enda jag vet. Det är som i livet, de lyckliga stunderna är när man inte är medveten om sig själv.”
― Bodil Malmsten

“Vi är alltså svaga, och hon, kvinnan med någon sorts ceriserosa kavaj och lite för trång blus, så där så att det glipar över bysten, är alltså stark.
Jag är inte säker på att jag vill ha den här beskäftiga och illa klädda kvinnan på ’min sida’. Jag fruktar att hon inte är lika smart som jag. Jag tror att hon är dum och jag är smart, men visst, jag kan väl sympatisera med de dumma. Stå på deras sida och försvara de stackarna, men jag vill helst inte att de för min talan. Jag tror inte att hennes intellektuella kapacitet räcker till för det. Nämligen.”
― Ann Heberlein, Ett gott liv

“I don't want to be at the mercy of my emotions. I want to use them, to enjoy them, and to dominate them.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“Anybody can sympathise with the sufferings of a friend, but it requires a very fine nature to sympathise with a friend's success.”
― Oscar Wilde

“The opposite of depression is not happiness, but vitality and my life, as I write this, is vital even when sad. I may wake up sometime next year without my mind again; it is not likely to stick around all the time. Meanwhile, however, I have discovered what I would have to call a soul, a part of myself I could never have imagined until one day, seven years ago, when hell came to pay me a surprise visit. It's a precious discovery. Almost every day I feel momentary flashes of hopelessness and wonder every time whether I am slipping. For a petrifying instant here and there, a lightning-quick flash, I want a car to run me over...I hate these feelings but, but I know that they have driven me to look deeper at life, to find and cling to reasons for living, I cannot find it in me to regret entirely the course my life has taken. Every day, I choose, sometimes gamely, and sometimes against the moment's reason, to be alive. Is that not a rare joy?”
― Andrew Solomon, The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression

“Burnout at its deepest level is not the result of some train wreck of examinations, long call shifts, or poor clinical evaluations. It is the sum total of hundreds and thousands of tiny betrayals of purpose, each one so minute that it hardly attracts notice. When a great ship steams across the ocean, even tiny ripples can accumulate over time, precipitating a dramatic shift in course. There are many Tertius Lydgates, male and female, inhabiting the lecture halls, laboratories, and clinics of today’s medical schools. Like latter-day Lydgates, many of them eventually find themselves expressing amazement and disgust at how far they have veered from their primary purpose.”
― Richard Gunderman

“When, however, one reads of a witch being ducked, of a woman possessed by devils, of a wise woman selling herbs, or even of a very remarkable man who had a mother, then I think we are on the track of a lost novelist, a suppressed poet, of some mute and inglorious Jane Austen, some Emily Bronte who dashed her brains out on the moor or mopped and mowed about the highways crazed with the torture that her gift had put her to. Indeed, I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.”
― Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

“There is a kind of sadness in not wanting the things that give so many other people their life's meaning. There can be sadness at not living out a more universal story - the suppose life cycle - how out of one life cycle another cycle is supposed to come. But when out of your life, no new cycle comes, what does that feel like? It feels like nothing. Yet there is a bit of a let-down feeling when the great things that happen in the lives of others - you don't actually want those things for yourself.”
― Sheila Heti, Motherhood

“Sometimes, when I’m careless, I think survival is easy: you just keep moving forward with what you have, or what’s left of what you were given, until something changes—or you realize, at last, that you can change without disappearing, that all you had to do was wait until the storm passes you over and you find that—yes—your name is still attached to a living thing.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous