Jessica

“I could never have been anything if I remained with him. Don't you see? Who wants to be a helper, merely? But I don't say this. It sounds cold when in fact the opposite is true. He eclipsed everything. I handed myself over to him and he lived in me. I found it almost impossible to do anything in his presence. It occurs to me, only now, what he gave me by not saying he loved me. My solitude. He wanted what was at the heart of me to remain my own. Being with him required all my thinking and loving and force, all the time. Everything I had. It was not pure awe, because somehow it oddly gave me strength. To see into the centre of him and then into the centre of me.”
― Heidi Sopinka, The Dictionary of Animal Languages

“He knows I am a lifelong insomniac. How profound working into the night has been. It always strikes me how odd it is that we live with such divisions, that we spend half our lives lying down, in blackout.”
― Heidi Sopinka, The Dictionary of Animal Languages

“I've never understood why everyone know know that women are the ones who convey things in the most interesting ways, I say. We have always observed. We have been used to no audience and that has given us room to really see.”
― Heidi Sopinka, The Dictionary of Animal Languages

“You cannot understand stillness when you have the full range of motion. We are all just bodies when it comes down to it. Though when you grow old, you are edged out of even that. How little you are able to inhabit it. You notice that pleasures always involve verbs.”
― Heidi Sopinka, The Dictionary of Animal Languages