Glasgow Quotes

Human nature. I don’t like human nature, but I do like human beings.

That's how hearts get broken, you know. When you believe in promises.

People should know about us. Girls who write their pain on their bodies. ~Louisa

I'm tired and angry at me. For letting myself get smaller and smaller in the hopes that he would notice me more. But how can someone notice you if you keep getting smaller?

I just want to feel better. My own body is my deepest enemy. It wants, it wants, it wants and when it does not get, it cries and cries and I punish it. How can you live in fear of your own body?

I remember the stars that night. They were like salt against the sky, like someone spilled the shaker against very dark cloth. That mattered to me, their accidental beauty.

Don't let the cereal eat you. It's only a fucking box of cereal, but it will eat you alive if you let it.

Go be absolutely, positively, fucking angelic.

Girl listens to radio. Girl finds music. Girl has whole other world. Girl slips on headphones. World gone.

Everyone has that moment I think, the moment when something so momentous happens that it rips your very being into small pieces. And then you have to stop. For a long time, you gather your pieces. And it takes such a very long time, not to fit them back together, but to assemble them in a new way, not necessarily a better way. More, a way you can live with until you know for certain that this piece should go there, and that one there.

She's not a cookie, or a book, or a record on a shelf. You can't just play with her and then put her back.

+"I think u are having a different sort of heartbreak. Maybe a kind of heartbreak of being in the world when u don’t know how to be.

...when I look at my arms, I don't think revolutionary. I think sad, and pain, but not revolutionary.

... it's remembering what it's like to cut, and cut hard. The way you have to dig the glass in, deeply, right away, to break the skin and then drag, and drag fiercely, to make a river worth drowning in.

The only difference between a rut and a grave are the dimensions.

Cutting is a fence you build upon your own body to keep people out but then you cry to be touched. But the fence is barbed. What then?

I'm so unwhole. I don't know where all the pieces of me are, how to fit them together, how to make them stick. Or if I even can.

You can't break my heart, she cries, breathy and furious. You can't own my soul. What I have, I made, what I have is mine. What I have I made, what I have is mine.

I'm no stranger to fucking up.

I'm always losing things.

A girl's life is the worst life in the world. A girl's life is: you are born, you bleed, you burn.

I cut because I can't deal. It's as simple as that. The world becomes an ocean, the ocean washes over me, the sound of water is deafening, the water drowns my heart, my panic becomes as large as planets. I need to hurt myself more than the world can hurt me, and then I can comfort myself.

And you know what makes me super mad? If a guy has scars, it's like some heroic shit show or something. But women? We're just creepy freaks.

Each aberration of my skin is a song. Press your mouth against me. You will hear so much singing.

I'm so lonely in the world I want to peel all of my flesh off and walk, just bone and gristle, straight into the river, to be swallowed.

But the fucked-up part is once you start self-harming, you can never not be a creepy freak, because your whole body is now a scarred and charred battlefield and nobody likes that on a girl, nobody will love that, and so all of us, every one, is screwed, inside and out. Wash, rinse, fucking repeat.

Everything and everybody that's busted can be fixed. That's what I think.

I think you are having a different sort of heartbreak. Maybe a kind of heartbreak of being in the world when you don't know how to be. If that makes any sense?

People aren't nice, people aren't nice, you should know that by now.

Because while I say sadness what I really mean is black hole inside me filled with nails and rocks and broken glass and the words I don't have anymore.

But there isn't a single word in the universe that you can think of that would describe the way you feel right now.

You are carrying so many heavy feelings. There just isn’t enough room for them all.

Dear Ellis, I have something really fucking angelic to tell you.

Keep your shit together and stay strong, he whispers in my ear.

There’s so much I wish I didn’t have to know about living.

McGregor went on to say, “Hamish, take word of this situation directly to Robert de Bruce, who is currently in the Glasgow area. Let him know that the Sassenach queen is at Tynemouth Priory and that we are going to capture her! She will fetch us a high ransom price from the Sassenach king!

That's what was in my head in the attic when I took broken glass from my tender kit and began to cut myself into tiny pieces.

Rain was a natural state of Glasgow. It kept the grass green and the people pale and bronchial.

There are so many people who are never coming back.

Because when everything is said and done... the world runs on kindness. It simply has to, or we'd never be a able to bear ourselves. It might not seem so to you now, but it will when you're older." ~Ariel

Welcome to Glasgow - the city where we punch people who are on fire.

The key to everything is patience. You get the chicken by hatching the egg, not by smashing it.

There is being alone. And then there is being alone. They are not the same thing at all.

I'm running blind, ghosts swallowing me.

... because it is hard enough being a girl in the world, but try being a girl with scars on your skin in the world.

There are too many people in my head. I claw at my body to get them out, to peel out the blackness spreading inside me. I’m running blind, ghosts swallowing me.

I don't feel sad. For just now, I don't feel scared. I feel, for right now, well, kind of triumphant.

Everyone here seems to know exactly what they need, but I leave without a thing.

I’m so unwhole. I don’t know where all the pieces of me are, how to fit them together, how to make them stick. Or if I even can.

All change is not growth, as all movement is not forward.

this book is for the grievers this book is for the left behind this book is for every broken heart searching for a home

Self-harm is not a grab for attention. It doesn’t mean you are suicidal. It means you are struggling to get out of a very dangerous mess in your mind and heart and this is your coping mechanism. It means that you occupy a small space in the very real and very large canyon of people who suffer from depression or mental illness.

You can’t put your life on hold for somebody else, you know? Sometimes you just have to do what you have to do to make yourself happy. And if you’re not, like, solid with yourself, how can you help somebody else?

Who Knew I'd Make Her So Blue.

People should know about us. Girls who write their pain on their bodies.

He's like the desert itself: it's so beautiful, it's so warm, but there are sharp edges everywhere that you have to watch out for

They should tell you, right when you get here, that that part of wishing is over. What we’ve done, no one will love us. Not in a normal way.

Sometimes you need to open yourself to the possibility of the miraculous, Tiger Tolliver. Sometimes you just do.

Everyone has that moment, I think, the moment when something so...momentous happens that it rips your very being into small pieces. And then you have to stop. For a long time, you gather your pieces. And it takes such a very long time, not to fit them back together, but to assemble them in a new way, not necessarily a better way. More, a way you can live with until you know for certain that this piece should go there, and that one there.

This whole place is a world of sobbing girls.

Mickey holds up the soggy paper. DIE. Don't you die.

Things get away from you sometimes, and you can’t get them back.

I think you are having a different sort of heartbreak. Maybe a kind of heartbreak of being in the world when you don't know how to be.

How glorious it is to drown

It's all right if you can't remember. Our subconscious is spectacularly agile. Sometimes it knows when to take us away, as a kind of protection.

OUT. CUT IT ALL OUT. Cut out my father. Cut out my mother. Cut out missing Ellis. Cut out the man in the underpass, cut out Fucking Frank, the men downstairs; the people on the street with too many people inside them, cut out hungry, and sad and tired, and being nobody and unpretty and unloved, just cut it all out, get smaller and smaller until I was nothing.

I blink at myself. I could be a girl, a real girl. I could be a possibility, with Mikey. Couldn't I?

I wish you'd stayed longer. I had so much to tell you. I just know you would have understood.

Books are good. I can live life safely and without peril in a fictional universe.

Maybe people just use different things to fill up the emptiness. Until it becomes less about feeling empty and more about feeding something else.

She said,"Don't be scared, little one.

You have to make friends with the dark.

How dare you waste a life you haven’t even lived yet.

There is no support so strong as the strength that enables one to stand alone.

It could be disappointment, too, Tiger, and you need to prepare yourself for that. But if it's disappointing, it doesn't have to be devastating, does that make sense? Life has this, life has that, and then something else comes along again, like a wave. We ride the waves. You go down, you go up, you go down, sometimes you just drift.

After he died, my mother was like a crab: she tucked everything inside and left only her shell.

It’s sort of like that poem: I thought I was done with death, at least a little bit, but death wasn’t done with me.

Sometimes I feel like those guys in that weird play Hoffmeister made us read. I think about what those two odd guys said. You must go on. I can’t go on. You must go on. Because what other choice is there, really? You have to make friends with the dark.

We could all probably be a little more benevolent in life. We all live here, after all. We all share the same mighty good company of the stars at night, and everyone deserves kindness, and survival. Everyone deserves to be seen.

Evan always used to day that it wasn't that you couldn't see that you should be afraid of, but what was right in front of you, in plain sight.

It is a though he is spreading a veil of protectiveness over me, and I am greedy for it.

Most women want their youth back again; but I wouldn't have mine back at any price. The worst years of my life are behind me, and my best ones ahead.

Invisibility does that to you. Strips away fancy layers, leaves just the bones and blood. Just enough to get around.

I need release, I need to hurt myself more than the world can hurt me, and then I can comfort myself.

I kept walking, but inside, I felt myself pause, just for a second.

Sometimes your life falls to ash and you sift through, waiting for the pain to pass, looking for the remnants in the debris, something to save, when really all you need is right there, inside you.

I room with Louisa. Louisa is older and her hair is like a red-and-gold noisy ocean down her back. There's so much of it, she can't even keep it in with braids or buns or scrunchies. Her hair smells like strawberries; she smells better than any girl I've ever known. I could breathe her in forever. My first night here, when she lifted her blouse to change for bed, in the moment before that crazy hair fell over her body like a protective cape, I saw them, all of them, and I sucked my breath in hard. She said, "Don't be scared, little one." I wasn't scared. I'd just never seen a girl with skin like mine.

They make me...they make me think of being stuck somewhere? I don't know, like weighted down, but then these patches...

[...] who tests you on a novel? The whole idea of reading a novel, or a poem, is to come up with your own ideas about it.

Sometimes you’re so hungry, so thirsty for something to fill you up, you’ve craved it for so long, but when you finally have it, it hurts going down. It’s not a medicine for what ails you. It might just be the thing that is keeping you sick.

when every day was heightened heartbeat and the nights lasted years, waiting for the dark to end, jumping at every sound, trying to find a safe place to hide. There is being alone, and then there is being alone. They are not the same thing at all.

Charlie Davis finds her voice, and her solace, in drawing. I find mine in writing. What's your solace? Do you know? Find it and don't stop doing it, ever. Find your people (because you need to talk), your tribe, your reason to be, and I swear to you, the other side will emerge, slowly but surely.

There are things happening inside me that I don’t even have words for, and I usually have words for everything, even if I don’t say them out loud. A shiver suddenly breaks us apart. A sharp chill rushes through me, when just a second ago, I was warmer than I’d ever been. My teeth start chattering.

I cut because I can't deal. It's as simple as that. The world becomes an ocean, the ocean washes over me, the sound of water is deafening, the water drowns my heart, my panic becomes as large as planets. I need release, I need to hurt myself more than the world can hurt me, and then I can comfort myself.

Casper didn't give me direction for what to do if somebody I used to really like-like, somebody who would be somebody good to love, somebody right, somebody who understood about me, turned out to not have the same ideas about me.

Riley's sway as he disappeared down the alley, I recognized it. It wasn't booze. It was the thing that happened when a little too much got a little too messed up. They sway, it's what creeps over a person when they've begun to empty out and don't care enough to put anything back, to replace what has been lost.

The afternoon slipped away while we talked -- she talked brightly when any subject came up that interested her -- and it was the last hour of day -- that grave, still hour when the movement of life seems to droop and falter for a few precious minutes -- that brought us the thing I had dreaded silently since my first night in the house.

It seemed there was an announcement every five minutes from the mythical conductor, imparting sagacious gems such as "large items should be placed in the overhead luggage racks", or that "passengers should report any unattended items to the train crew as soon as possible". I wondered at whom these pearls of wisdom were aimed; some passing extraterrestrial, perhaps, or a yak herder from Ulan Bator who had trekked across the steppes, sailed the North Sea, and found himself on the Glasgow-Edinburgh service with literally no prior experience of mechanized transport to call upon?

There was a silence and then Alice, the oldest person in the room, cleared her throat. Alice has watery eyes and fluffy white hair and favors sweatpants and sweatshirts with glittery stars and flowers. Alice lost her mother when she was ten. That is a whole lifetime without a mother, to get used to not having a mother, and yet here she is. All these years later. Still grieving. Alice said, “Write me a letter telling me how to live for the rest of my life without you.” She paused. “That was sixty-four years ago, and I still would like to know.” I’m writing this down because someday I will be Alice, with a whole lifetime spent without a mother, a lifetime of walking around with a Grand Canyon of grief in my heart, and people should know what that feels like.

I think that slopes are meant to be slippery. I don't know why. I don't even know who invented the stupid notion of them. I don't even know why it matters. Who cares? Who cares about a scarred girl who can't seem to be by herself? Who cares about a scarred girl who mops floors and ferries drugs for her boyfriend? The scarred girl should care. But she doesn't know how and once you let the Makers Mark in, once you let anything like that in, like kissing, or sex, alcohol, drugs, anything that fills up time and makes you feel better, even if it's just for a little while, well, you're going to be a goner. And sometimes, once, maybe twice, she starts to say that she's thinking of taking a class with this lady artist, and stops, because a little mouse taps her brain and heart and whispers, 'But then you won't get to spend so much time with Riley,' and the words, they turn to stone again, fat in her throat, and she can feel little bits of herself disappearing in the large thing of Riley and me and and and ... The slippery slope, it will never, ever end.