133 quotes found
“Shed taken care of me in all the ways my body needed, but the devastation of my rape had made me feel the weight of the essential way she had neglected me: she hadnt nurtured the potential of my st...”
“Squatting on my bedafter twelve years of trying and missing, in about two minutes totalI put my own contacts in for the first time. Second try on the right eye, first try on the left. I blinked in ...”
“I hoped my solitude would help me reclaim my innocence, remember who Id been, to find who I wanted to be. To become her. To love her, Deborah, Debby, Doll Girl, Wild Child, me, despite the irrevers...”
“I didnt know what I would do. There was no way I could survive. I stared at my damp tent ceiling, feeling the frigid air against me, the frozen ground against my bottom, so cold my bare skin burned...”
“This was a vision of wildness contained caged. Huge, powerful animals whose wild dignity was stripped from them.Panic jolted me. These animals had had their freedom seized by people who put their ...”
“He hadnt treated me with the love and compassion I wanted, but I was worthy of that love, and someday some boy would have it for me. I hadnt found it yet, but I would find it soon.”
“My path, beyond doubt or denial. I just hadnt looked toward it. I wasnt lost. Id always known the way. If Id only allowed myself to look. I had never been lost, only scared.”
“death is not a pretty flower that had almost pricked me. It was not a small annoyance I could simply bypass and quickly disregard. It was really The End.”
“I couldnt yet piece together the disconnected clues to understand the origin of these lights. To explain away strange magic, Id convinced myself there was an unseen road cutting across the boundles...”
“My mother overstated the dangers of the world invented threats. And so I saw: Starbursts hoof-made gelatin never gave me mad cow. Mad cow was not a threat to me. And so I thought: most risks weren...”
“I sensed he was the one who might be able to see me clearly, the way I most wished to be seen.”
“The entire time, hed only ever looked at my body, never at my face, his empty eyes hungry, never seeing me at all. I wasnt the presence of a person, but a body. I could have said anything, he would...”
“Chinese proverb says that a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. This journey had begun with the coercion of my body, with my own wild hope.”
“Id begun at the soundless place where California touches Mexico with five Gatorade bottles full of water and eleven pounds of gear and lots of candy. My backpack was tiny, no bigger than a schoolgi...”
“If I wanted to go to bed at ten oclock I did. If I wanted to go to bed at six p.m., I did. I woke at sunrise because the new sun lit my eyes. The sun was my clock; my body my pace-keeper. I started...”
“I felt like I belonged to an ancient tradition of all young people given this same task of finding their own ways through to the futures they wanted for themselves.”
“I wrote through darkness, vividly seeing: my passivity was not a crime; my desire to trust was not a flaw.”
“From that unremarkable gap in dense northern forest, I could finally see clearly that if I hadnt walked away from school, through devastating beauty alone on the Pacific Crest Trail, met rattlesnak...”
“I began to lust after our conjoining life.”
“But I couldnt say any of this yet. No one answer felt it could contain anything close to the truth about her. My thoughts of my mother were wild chaos, I didnt know how to tell him wed been enmeshe...”
