Janette > Janette's Quotes

“You can’t put your life on hold for somebody else, you know? Sometimes you just have to do what you have to do to make yourself happy. And if you’re not, like, solid with yourself, how can you help somebody else?”
― Kathleen Glasgow, You'd Be Home Now

“We could all probably be a little more benevolent in life. We all live here, after all. We all share the same mighty good company of the stars at night, and everyone deserves kindness, and survival. Everyone deserves to be seen.”
― Kathleen Glasgow, You'd Be Home Now

“Maybe people just use different things to fill up the emptiness. Until it becomes less about feeling empty and more about feeding something else.”
― Kathleen Glasgow, You'd Be Home Now

“Sometimes your life falls to ash and you sift through, waiting for the pain to pass, looking for the remnants in the debris, something to save, when really all you need is right there, inside you.”
― Kathleen Glasgow, You'd Be Home Now

“How dare you waste a life you haven’t even lived yet.”
― Kathleen Glasgow, You'd Be Home Now

“It’s not that I liked it or didn’t like it, but I felt safe there. I felt like I was in a little cocoon, almost. No more Mom, no more Dad. No more disappointing them and you. I felt safe. Like all the noise was gone.”
― Kathleen Glasgow, You'd Be Home Now

“Someone I used to know said that’s the problem with adults. They just see kids as they want them to be, what they aren’t, and not as they are. I think about that all the time. Like, how much time and pain and suffering could be eliminated if you just accepted the kid in front of you and stopped trying to fix them. Maybe there is no “fixing.” Maybe there is just heartbreak and love and trying to help them stay alive, whatever it takes.”
― Kathleen Glasgow, You'd Be Home Now

“The young should not die before the old,” she says. “How dare you waste a life you haven’t even lived yet.”
― Kathleen Glasgow, You'd Be Home Now

“this: sometimes the waves knock you down and it seems like you won’t have the strength to push back up, but you do, because whatever the water takes down, it gives back. But you have to adapt or die. Now, go swim.”
― Kathleen Glasgow, You'd Be Home Now

“Everyone has that moment I think, the moment when something so momentous happens that it rips your very being into small pieces. And then you have to stop. For a long time, you gather your pieces. And it takes such a very long time, not to fit them back together, but to assemble them in a new way, not necessarily a better way. More, a way you can live with until you know for certain that this piece should go there, and that one there.”
― Kathleen Glasgow, Girl in Pieces

“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

“I remember the stars that night. They were like salt against the sky, like someone spilled the shaker against very dark cloth. That mattered to me, their accidental beauty.”
― Kathleen Glasgow, Girl in Pieces

“+"I think u are having a different sort of heartbreak. Maybe a kind of heartbreak of being in the world when u don’t know how to be.”
― Kathleen Glasgow, Girl in Pieces

“I cut because I can't deal. It's as simple as that. The world becomes an ocean, the ocean washes over me, the sound of water is deafening, the water drowns my heart, my panic becomes as large as planets. I need to hurt myself more than the world can hurt me, and then I can comfort myself.”
― Kathleen Glasgow, Girl in Pieces

“I'm so unwhole. I don't know where all the pieces of me are, how to fit them together, how to make them stick. Or if I even can.”
― Kathleen Glasgow, Girl in Pieces

“I'm so lonely in the world I want to peel all of my flesh off and walk, just bone and gristle, straight into the river, to be swallowed.”
― Kathleen Glasgow, Girl in Pieces

“I think you are having a different sort of heartbreak. Maybe a kind of heartbreak of being in the world when you don't know how to be. If that makes any sense?”
― Kathleen Glasgow, Girl in Pieces

“Dear Ellis, I have something really fucking angelic to tell you.”
― Kathleen Glasgow, Girl in Pieces

“But there isn't a single word in the universe that you can think of that would describe the way you feel right now.”
― Kathleen Glasgow, How to Make Friends with the Dark

“You are carrying so many heavy feelings. There just isn’t enough room for them all.”
― Kathleen Glasgow, How to Make Friends with the Dark

“There’s so much I wish I didn’t have to know about living.”
― Kathleen Glasgow, How to Make Friends with the Dark

“It could be disappointment, too, Tiger, and you need to prepare yourself for that. But if it's disappointing, it doesn't have to be devastating, does that make sense? Life has this, life has that, and then something else comes along again, like a wave. We ride the waves. You go down, you go up, you go down, sometimes you just drift.”
― Kathleen Glasgow, How to Make Friends with the Dark

“this book
is for the grievers
this book
is for the left behind
this book
is for every broken heart
searching for a home”
― Kathleen Glasgow, How to Make Friends with the Dark

“There was a silence and then Alice, the oldest person in the room, cleared her throat. Alice has watery eyes and fluffy white hair and favors sweatpants and sweatshirts with glittery stars and flowers. Alice lost her mother when she was ten. That is a whole lifetime without a mother, to get used to not having a mother, and yet here she is. All these years later. Still grieving.

Alice said, “Write me a letter telling me how to live for the rest of my life without you.” She paused.

“That was sixty-four years ago, and I still would like to know.”

I’m writing this down because someday I will be Alice, with a whole lifetime spent without a mother, a lifetime of walking around with a Grand Canyon of grief in my heart, and people should know what that feels like.”
― Kathleen Glasgow, How to Make Friends with the Dark

“Books are good. I can live life safely and without peril in a fictional universe.”
― Kathleen Glasgow, How to Make Friends with the Dark

“There are things happening inside me that I don’t even have words for, and I usually have words for everything, even if I don’t say them out loud. A shiver suddenly breaks us apart. A sharp chill rushes through me, when just a second ago, I was warmer than I’d ever been. My teeth start chattering.”
― Kathleen Glasgow, How to Make Friends with the Dark

“You have to make friends with the dark.”
― Kathleen Glasgow, How to Make Friends with the Dark

“It’s sort of like that poem: I thought I was done with death, at least a little bit, but death wasn’t done with me.”
― Kathleen Glasgow, How to Make Friends with the Dark

“What’s really important is the essence of the life lived. A college degree isn’t going to tell me how well somebody lived, now is it? Does having a boat mean you lived a good life? Or a summerhouse? What about saving each valentine your son made or even working a roadside jam stand? A million, what do they call it?—selfies—on some silly website. What does it all mean, in the end?”
― Kathleen Glasgow, How to Make Friends with the Dark

“You have to tell me those things... You're my mom. It's in your job description.”
― Kathleen Glasgow, How to Make Friends with the Dark