hannah

“you can be hurt by people who look just like you. Not only can it happen, it probably will, because the world is full of hurt people who hurt people. Even if the dominant culture considers you an anomaly, that doesn’t mean you can’t be common, common as fucking dirt.”
― Carmen Maria Machado, In the Dream House

“There was a time when my life seemed so painful to me that reading about the lives of other women writers was one of the few things that could help. I was unhappy, and ashamed of it; I was baffled by my life. For several years in my early thirties, I would sit in my armchair reading books about these other lives. Sometimes when I came to the end, I would sit down and read the book through from the beginning again. I remember an incredible intensity about all this, and also a kind of furtiveness—as if I were afraid that someone might look through the window and find me out. Even now, I feel I should pretend that I was reading only these women's fiction or their poetry—their lives as they chose to present them, alchemized as art. But that would be a lie. It was the private messages I really liked—the journals and letters, and autobiographies and biographies whenever they seemed to be telling the truth. I felt very lonely then, self-absorbed, shut off. I needed all this murmured chorus, this continuum of true-life stories, to pull me through. They were like mothers and sisters to me, these literary women, many of them already dead; more than my own family, they seemed to stretch out a hand.”
― Kennedy Fraser, Ornament and Silence

“I thought you died, but writing this, I'm not sure you did.”
― Carmen Maria Machado, In the Dream House

“Virginia Woolf described in her fiction her chracters' pain in childhood way and linked it to their emotional lives as adults in a way that was ahead of its time. "It's a fallacy to think that children are unhappy... I've never suffered so much as I did when I was a child," says Richard Dalloway M.P., in The Voyage Out. ”
― Kennedy Fraser