Emma Forrest Quotes

In hindsight, I have no idea why he was ever with me. He thought highly of my breasts. And . . . that's it, I think.

When he kisses me, I cry. I explain it's not because I wish he were someone else, it's because it's such a shock to the system to be desired after feeling so completely abandoned.

I think I've lost my faith
and I can't stop writing
because I don't know how
much longer I can hold on.

I'm in love with someone good and kind and gentle, and he's seen the darkness too, but somehow we've become each other's light.

And then, with the feather-green darkness pressed against the windows, he puts his filthy fingers on my scrubbed hope face and says, "If I kiss you, it's all over." And then he does. And then it is.

But I saw the pain and sadness in everything, and swirled it round my mouth like a fine wine.

It's as if he can no longer acknowledge the love he felt or the pain I am in. I have been dismissed. I don't think I was smarter or as beautiful as the other girls he did this to. It's just that I was me. It was all I had.

People don't know. We don't know ourselves so we tell ourselves what we really know is other people. We could say the depth of pain we feel for the lovers who've left us is because we knew them so well.

Now that he's gone, I feel like I'm a senior citizen who gave away her life savings over the phone.
And this is the crux: I never in my life believed in someone as much as I believed in him.
The shame is overwhelming.

Bad people very often do one good thing.

In other words, it was a struggle with himself. And the product of that struggle: anger, bitterness, resentment, envy or transformation, aspiration, hope, decency..the product of that struggle is the quality of your life and the nature of your soul.

Let me tell you something: when you dance, you are the greatest dancer who has ever lived. And when you sing, you will have the courage to raise your voice to the heavens, knowing that you may never get an answer.

Your own love story? Your paramour may have had lovers before you. But no one has ever loved him the way you do. No one has ever heard music. Not the way you hear it. The songs are beautiful vampires, asleep in your iPod, coming alive at night, aglow. You can have them on your hours, yours to conduct. Music shapes us and we shape it.

You may right now be nursing a broken heart. Friends will say, "Aren't you glad you had the experience anyway?" And you may say "No." Eventually, unbelievably, you may not remember the boy that triggered it all. You'll recall all the places you visited, but not how you got there. You'll remember the songs that you listened to.

If killing yourself is not an option anymore,
you have to sink into the darkness instead,
and make something out of it.

What people don't understand when you've already been a suicide and pulled through is that after the sadness comes fear: Where is my mind going with this? I don't want to die. I do not want to die. When you don't have so much control over your own thoughts, over the myriad voices in your head,
you don't know where they could go.

The sadness ― the general sadness that squats and pees inside my brain ― isn't over.
It never will be.
I know how best to chase it away, though.
It usually works. Sometimes it doesn't.
But I pray and say, fuck it, then.
I choose this.
It chooses me.
I choose it back.

When you live with voices in your head, you are drawn inextricably to voices outside your head. Very often the voices work to confirm your worst suspicions. Or think of things you could never have imagined! There are only so many hours of the day to hate yourself.

I'm not crazy or dangerous,
just a bit eccentric and lonely.

The goal was to get sane, to get whole, to be complete enough to support someone else.