Shannon Celebi Quotes

I am forever an advocate of books, both the reading of them and the writing. There is something sacred to me in that community. Because writing-and reading-is a solitary business. And it’s good to know I’m not alone.

Just write. That's my only tip. And read. I guess that's two.

I long for some connection, to the real and those who love them, and hope that my fiction can reach beyond the veil, that I might touch someone and make them feel something…or something.

Cuz I can count on one hand the men who’ve loved me, not in the Biblical sense - I don’t have enough digits for that - but who have truly loved me.

Instead, I opened my eyes to find the thing in front of my face, wafting dead horse breath across my chin and up my nose, its mouth like a gaping maw; its eyes, two giant wormholes, twisting and bending with some apparitional substance that could have been space and time if I’d known anything about physics.

Sometimes, I feel my breath coming in shorter, quicker, spastic bursts, feel my heart threaten to thunder through my ribs, feel sweat beading on my brow...and I know it’s time to bust out those “chocolate frogs” from Harry Potter.

Okay, I’ll just jump right out and say it. I have anxiety issues.

Of course, I rationalize the fear. I realize it’s not real, that my house isn’t burning down, that the deer aren’t going to kill me.

Once upon a long ago time I was a girl with hopeful halos in my eyes - not unlike you - not a typical beauty but beautiful nonetheless, as all young girls tend to be in their prime, even if they don’t tend to know it.

Using one’s beauty was the only way a smart girl could get by, at least that’s how it was back then, though even for a smart girl there were really only three professions. You could be a nurse or a teacher or a wife.

I hung a picture of him above my bed and learned by hand the internal workings of the female combustion engine.

She fantasized sometimes too about killing him a little: a little poison in his pudding, a little flick-flick-flick with a fillet knife at his throat.

She also understood there was a hole in her heart where her son should be, that she was a wicked, selfish woman for wishing him back.

She was no stripper with a heart of gold, that was for sure. A heart of steel, more like.

A woman brings so much more to the world than birth, for she can birth discovery, intelligence, invention, art, just as well as any man.

My sister and I are so close that we finish each other’s sentences and often wonder who’s memories belong to whom.

We didn’t want to admit it then, but we were friends. Best friends.

Mama wasn't dead...exactly. They all said she was, but when Elma was small, she seen Mama creep into her room at night, half-naked, head all bloodied red like when they found her by the well that day, and Elma reckoned dead just meant pretendin' you couldn't move or breathe until nightfall when you got up and walked around like you was free.

You’re saying, “What the hell am I gonna do with her?” You’re saying, “Shit, did she take her pills?” You’re saying, “Once upon a time, I used to have a little girl.

Then the weeks rolled by in a sinister psych ward haze filled with white-coated orderlies and rocking whack-job patients torn straight from some old Jack Nicholson film, all anti-psychotic meds and padded lonely cells...