Melissa Williams

“Had I translated them, I would have realised those lines read: ‘Never feel this bad again. Never come back to this place, where only a knife will do. Live a gentle and kind life. Don’t do things that make you want to hurt yourself. Whatever you do, every day, remember this – then steer away from here.”
― Caitlin Moran, How to Build a Girl

“And what happens, when ‘it’ finds you, is that something happens to your eyes. When you get angry, they go very pale blue, like bone china made of real bones, and your anger becomes so big that it fills the house, and everyone lives in it. You caught it, off the explosion. You are exploding, now. You are trying to be bigger than the explosion. Because you never stopped being scared of the explosion. Anger is just fear, brought to the boil.”
― Caitlin Moran, How to Build a Girl

“In later years, I can always recognise someone else who received this shot of fear at an early age – other kids from frangible houses; kids who felt the sand collapsing under their feet; kids who sat awake in the dark, imagining their whole families burning down, and planning planning planning who to save first from the future, and the flames, like The Amazing Mr Blunden (Antonia Barber, Puffin Books, 1972). Children raised on cortisol. Children who think too fast.”
― Caitlin Moran, How to Build a Girl

“the key to happiness – or that even more desired thing, calmness – lies not in always thinking happy thoughts. No. That is impossible. No mind on earth with any kind of intelligence could spend a lifetime enjoying only happy thoughts. The key is in accepting your thoughts, all of them, even the bad ones. Accept thoughts, but don’t become them.”
― Matt Haig, Reasons to Stay Alive