Bailey Pritchett

“I have seen this happen before, how one act of parental kindness across a history of cruelty can make a kid in here forgive everything that came before simply because they have been deprived of kindness for so long.”
― Kerry Kletter, The First Time She Drowned

“Part of being healthy is being able to hold and remember who people actually are instead of who we wish they were. It's a daily struggle against a brain that tends to want to cling to fairy-tale hope, but it's also the only way to guarantee a life surrounded by those who build rather than destroy. In the end, the loss is about letting go of what I never had in the first place.”
― Kerry Kletter, The First Time She Drowned

“who insisted every day that I see my own worth beyond my mother’s rejecting eyes. But of course, a mother’s eyes are the very first mirror we look into, the image that gets imprinted on our souls—whether they gaze back at us with love or with disgust. So I don’t know how to differentiate between her perceptions of me and my own when hers were the first I’ve ever known, so deeply ingrained from the second I hit the world.”
― Kerry Kletter, The First Time She Drowned

“...and then, I have nature and art and poetry, and if that is not enough, what is enough?”
― Vincent Willem van Gogh