Mona Awad Quotes

Why do you lie so much? And about the weirdest little things?", my mother always asked me. "I don’t know", I always said. But I did know. It was very simple. Because it was a better story.

But I wasn't listening. I wasn't stopping. Because we were already running away again, me and my imagination.

We never joke about bunnies, Bunny.

I've never really not written, never not had another world of my own making to escape to, never known how to be in this world without most of my soul dreaming up and living in another.

Can I take your coat?” Cupcake offers. I turn to her. She’s looking at me so hopefully. So willing to take a coat I’m not wearing, I almost want to give her my skin.

The poets brace themselves for imminent, overeducated poverty.

She was a great girl-shaped forest. She was a thing on fire. Her hand was leaves and smoke and snow and flesh all at once.

Don’t trade one kind of blindness for another.

They laugh. What’s so fucking funny? I want to say. But I don’t. I laugh with them. Ha. Haha. Hahaha.

I look at all of my dreams and nightmares distilled into one man-shaped shape. All the love and hate I have in my heart plus one fucking bunny.

You’re supposed to yell “fire,” though. Because no one comes when you yell “rape,” didn’t you know that, Bunny?

Behold the lavish tent under which the overeducated mingle, well versed in every art but the one of conversation.

Their cheeks are plump and pink and shining like they’ve been eating too much sugar, but actually it’s Gossip Glow, the flushed look that comes from throwing another woman under the bus.

How empty and emptied I felt walking away with all my words still on his floor. Wanting so badly to pick them back up. Take it all back. Wipe away the night, my dumb tears, my endless tumbling out of words. I never meant to give this to you.

We've read Jane Eyre too, you cunt, and we've read The Waves, and when we read it, you know, we wept for minutes. Then he stars weeping.

The real world lady, it's out there. Do you even know that? You're going to have to get back to it sometime.

Our mothers always said to look hard at the things of this world that are owies on the eyes because they will put more colors in your inner rainbow.

Read. Be a guest in other worlds.

You were such a lonely little girl, weren't you? Whispering to grass. Befriending sticks. Dreaming yourself into movies and books. Every screen, every page, like a door to another world, remember?

The truth is, if you go to Warren, no matter what is going on in your personal life—hair trouble, existential malaise, ax murder—you do the reading.

He called me dark, twisted, and mean.” “How sweet. He’s in love.

Then, Beowulf says wistfully, "Your beauty is nuanced and labyrinthine like a sentence by Proust.

Disorientation can be a very interesting space to occupy as a writer, Samantha. You should try it as an exercise over the holidays. It could be quite illuminating for you, I think.

It starts to rain. Hard. Because that’s the kind of weather that follows this kind of girl. She’s so slutty and dark she makes the clouds slutty and dark too. Pregnant with this dirty rain that starts to fall hard on both of us.

Later on I'm going to be really fucking beautiful. I'm going to grow into that nose and develop an eating disorder. I'll be hungry and angry all my life but I'll also have a hell of a time.

If she did ask, I would say it was grief. The deepest grief. I know she would accept that as an answer. No one knows what’s inside grief. Anything at all can be there.

The only journey that matters in the end, Daughter of Noelle.” “Retinol?” I whisper. “The soul. A journey of the soul, of course.

A song I used to hate that I loved surround-sounds my soul. It is a song about nightmares dressed as daydreams, about trading your soul for a kiss. I think not this song, never this song, but my soul is already singing along, riding its swells like an ocean wave, shimmering.

Because you simply can't sit back and allow your best friend to date an animal man of your own creation and say nothing. You can't. And say nothing? That would be just wrong, on so many levels.

I look at her lips shiny and thick with so much gloss. There’s a wavering quality to her voice, like a car swerving down a dangerous road.

We all fall, Ms. Fitch. We fall and we rise. Bones and tissue heal. But sometimes we want to hold on to the pain. Sometimes we have our reasons for not being able to let go.

Close my eyes. Let the night become dawn. Let the snow outside fall and fall like it will bury us. Please bury us. It would be totally fine by me.

Didn't you envy? Didn't you want? A mirror is only a mirror, Belle. It only ever reflects back what we desire and long for

What do you think, Samantha?” Fosco asks me. That it’s a piece of pretentious shit. That it says nothing, gives nothing. That I don’t understand it, that probably no one does and no one ever will. That not being understood is a privilege I can’t afford. That I can’t believe this woman got paid to come here. That I think she should apologize to trees. Spend a whole day on her knees in the forest, looking up at the trembling aspens and oaks and whatever other trees paper is made of with tears in her languid eyes and say, I’m fucking sorry. I’m sorry that I think I’m so goddamned interesting when it is clear that I am not interesting. Here’s what I am: I’m a boring tree murderess. But I look at Vignette, at Creepy Doll, at Cupcake, the Duchess. All of them staring at me now with shy smiles. “I think I’d like to see more of the soup too,” I hear myself say.

I swallow. My hands ungrip the cliff. Trust. I will not fall, I will float. Up into their high blue sky full of fluffy clouds and rainbows. Up, up, up into the pink mist and the laughing light.

What's the lesson here, Smackie? Don't jump to conclusions? Never lower your gaze first.

The real world, lady. It’s out there. Do you even know that? You’re going to have to get back to it sometime.

Like we could hug and hug and hug until our ribs crack and our hearts burst and our lungs collapse and our arms break off and still. We’d still be hugging air. No body.

When I look back at her, shes staring up at the moon, smiling serenely at it like the moon is her new best friend....

Without the sun, what’s the moon? Just a rock in the outer dark. Its illumination just a trick. Just a trick from the sun’s light, which it steals. And that’s what Beauty is too.

How amazing would that be? Each of us flushed and grinning in the spinning dark of our own overturned world

There was never anything to fear. Which is a little disappointing, frankly. Maybe I wanted to be obliterated.

There was a space there, too, like the one between me and Mother. Like the one between me and everyone forever after. There has been a space between me and everything ever since you turned to smoke. There has been a wall of glass.

I gesture to the window and smile. Budding branches. Pale green leaves. Spring. Spring, does she see that? A time when everything is in bloom. Everything is having sex. Everything is so damp and fragrant and fuckable.

But I doubt you did any of those things unless you have a mullet or a deep sense of irony.

She looks so much like a cupcake that when I first met her at orientation, I had a very real desire to eat her. Bite deeply into her white shoulder. Dig a fork in her cheek.

Until all my words had spilled to the floor. I was too drunk to pick them up. So leave them there.

Thank god, I tell myself. Which god, I don't know. Between Mother's and Father's gods, I picture a wide black space full of stars. That's the space I whisper up to. Maybe there's a god there too. My own

You do realize you’re in a cult, don’t you? You’re in a fucking cult.” This word hurts our ears so we cover them and think-sing a song from the latest Disney musical, which is our new favorite musical.

The universe is against us, which makes sense. So we get another McFlurry and talk about how fat we are for a while.

working as a bookstore wench, a waitress, an office wench, a waitress again—​the only jobs I could seem to get with my English degree.

Because life is shorter than we are, she says, so why beat around the bush?

It's the hour when all the shop mannequins conspire to look menacing. When they all appear to be smirking a little. The mannequins always reminded me of mother. Flawless, white, smiling.

Whenever I read one of Victoria’s vignettes, I always feel so dumb because I can hardly understand them at all. And then I blame myself. I think, Kira, this must be just too brilliant for you to grasp. Surely you must have missed something. Even though there’s always been this small voice inside of me that says, Um, what the fuck is this, please? This makes no sense. This is coy and this is willfully obscure and no one but Victoria will ever get this. I would in fact need to live inside Victoria’s spoiled, fragmented, lazy, pretentious little mind to get it. And who apart from us, apart from me, is going to be willing to do that? To work all night with a Victoria Decoder? Who would even care to? And then I feel like screaming JUST SAY IT. TELL ME WHAT HAPPENED. TELL ME WHAT THE FUCK THIS MEANS AND WHAT YOU DID WITH HIM EXACTLY.

Oh my god, how much does Bunny love Pinkberry? She loves it so much she loves it so much she loves it so fucking much oh my god. We are so happy right now, we could hop, we could dance. Who will dance with us?!

I’d spend hours hunting for something—anything—that would render me moderately fuckable. And if not fuckable, something in which I could grieve over the fact of not being fuckable with unbaubled dignity. I

Their bloody faces regarding me so kindly, so openly, that I know this is a friendship moment.

What I smell is the word forbidden, red and sharp and bittersweet, rising up like crushed roses under the bed.

If I had beauty, I decided then, I would never throw it away. I would never give it up.

Talking at me about her miserable life while I lie imprisoned on the floor. Pouring it all into me like emotional Drano.

The pink pony inside me weeps softly.

Fuck you, poets. You think you are so smart, so cool with your word art. You have no idea.

Sad. Very sad, Samantha. To be lost like this. Sad, sad, sad that when someone asks you, What do you want? nothing comes to mind but a pair of fists clutching little broken bits.

Because at Warren, the Body is all the rage. As though everyone in the academic world has just now discovered that they are vesseled in precarious, fastly decaying houses of bone and flesh and my god, what material.

The mothers always look around the campus like extremely interested buyers, their jeweled hands rubbing the backs of their fawnlike spawn as if to say: This could be yours, this could be yours.

That I think she should apologize to trees. Spend a whole day on her knees in the forest, looking up at the trembling aspens and oaks and whatever other trees paper is made of with tears in her languid eyes and say, I’m fucking sorry. I’m sorry that I think I’m so goddamned interesting when it is clear that I am not interesting. Here’s what I am: I’m a boring tree murderess.

Because books are dead, Smackey, didn't you know?

I get it, Samantha. Books, they’re like old friends. When I was here this summer, I carried four or five with me all the time.

Unlike my street, which smells of sad man piss, hers smells of autumn leaves.

what good is it to be left with no trace, to be wounded without the pleasure of a scar?

And that's when I realize that whatever pain I have, whatever true want that lives under all this greasy, spineless needing to please isn't something I want to give them.

Samantha Heather Mackey thinks she understands everything, but she fails to understand the depths of the human heart. She fails to understand the depths of our heart. Our heart our heart our heart! We’ve read Jane Eyre too, you cunt, and we’ve read The Waves, and when we read it, you know, we wept for minutes.

We huddle-hug on the velvety green among the cherry blossom trees. We link arms. We close our eyes the better to feel each other's bodies. We form a hot little circle of love and understanding. We press our faces into our faces, our cheeks against our cheeks, our eyelashes tickling our skins like little hummingbird wings, like Bunny nose twitches.

Death,” she says, “is just another door, Daughter, we must remember. Your mother,” she sighs, “was making such progress. A shame to lose her. But she did go the way of roses.” She smiles sadly. “Surely that’s a consolation.

You want to fuck, not be fucked,” Victoria says. “Samantha,” Eleanor intones, “is this making sense?” I stare at them all through Kira’s pink heart-shaped glasses. This is how she must see the world all the time. I look at their dark pink faces, so suddenly grave. I should call the police. I should run to Mexico. “Totally.

He looks at me like I’m a black funnel of wind, gathering force. Heading his way.

Crack running through his voice like a crack in a glass. Eyes still on my eyes. A sorrow there, fathoms deep. His sorrow or mine? I'm drowning in it like dark water

I used to go to bookstores but I can’t go in them anymore because I buy too many books.

I bite", Ava says, sliding out of the booth. "It’s a terrible, voluntary affliction".

But even though Ruth's only a hair thinner than I am, she's way on the other side of the fat girl spectrum, looking at me from the safe, slightly smug distance of her own control and conviction.

That I can’t protect you from my terrible places that I still go, can’t help but go because no one protected me, no one saved me, no one ever held out their hand and walked me away. But I’m trying to save you, Sunshine. I’m trying in my broken way.

Or is it our amazingly empathic hive mind that we make by hugging so that we become one of those animals with a brain and heart in each tentacle that connects to a bigger, cosmic heart-brain that is like a shared, all-seeing third eye? Who knows? Who cares?

She used to tell you fairy tales at night, remember? Once upon a time. When you were a sad, dreamy little girl. Each night you lay in your princess bed, surrounded by your glassy-eyed dolls, waiting for her like a wish

I am a boring tree murderess

Ice still on the windshield. Trucks roaring past like laughing devils.

What, am I supposed to feel guilty?" I say. He looks confused. "Guilty?" "That I feel fine for once? That I'm not limping and moaning around? Dragging my leg like Briana? Lying on the floor, crying into my ears when everyone else around me rolls their eyes? I'm supposed to feel bad that I'm better now? I'm supposed to cry over a little cut. To what? To make you feel like I'm not a monster. I need to perform my little bit of pain for you so you'll know I'm human?" "Miranda, I didn't mean—" "But not too much pain, am I right? Not too much, never too much. If it was too much, you wouldn't know what to do with me, would you? Too much would make you uncomfortable. Bored. My crying would leave a bad taste. That would just be bad theater, wouldn't it? A bad show. You want a good show. They all do. A few pretty tears on my cheeks that you can brush away. Just a delicate little bit of ouch so you know there's someone in there. So you don't get too scared of me, am I right? So you know I'm still a vulnerable thing. That I can be brought down if need be.

That not being understood is a privilege I can’t afford. That I can’t believe this woman got paid to come here. That I think she should apologize to trees. Spend a whole day on her knees in the forest, looking up at the trembling aspens and oaks and whatever other trees paper is made of with tears in her languid eyes and say, I’m fucking sorry. I’m sorry that I think I’m so goddamned interesting when it is clear that I am not interesting. Here’s what I am: I’m a boring tree murderess.

Sometimes when I tell myself or Ava the story, it grows teeth and it’s something. Definitely something. Other times, it comes apart in my hands like air. But if I remember all the right details. If I tell them in the right order. If I pause in the right places, trail off in the right places . . .

My father has always felt that being fat was a choice. When I was in college I would sometimes meet him for lunch or coffee, and he would stare at my extra flesh like it was some weird piece of clothing I was wearing just to annoy him. Like my fat was an elaborate turban or Mel’s zombie tiara or some anarchy flag that, in my impetuous youth, I was choosing to hold up and wave in his face. Not really part of me, just something I was doing to rebel, prove him wrong. I started seeing him even less. Now, I wouldn’t say he’s proud of me. As far as he is concerned, things have just become as they should be. I’ve finally put down the flag. Taken off the turban. Case closed. Good for me.

But not too much pain, am I right? Not too much, never too much. If it was too much, you wouldn't know what to do with me, would you? Too much would make you uncomfortable. Bored. My crying would leave a bad taste. That would just be bad theatre, wouldn't it? A bad show. You want a good show. They all do. A few pretty tears on my cheeks that you can brush away. Just a delicate little bit of ouch so you know there's someone in there. So you don't get too scared of me, am I right? So you know I'm still a vulnerable thing. That I can be brought down if I need be.

I walk toward what I think is the school, getting lost again and again until at last the moldering, vacant storefronts switch to juice bars and dog salons and I glimpse the Ivy Bubble. The towers upon which Ava and I have sat like gargoyles. Everyone on the street suddenly goes from looking like an extra in a zombie movie to the star of a French New Wave film.

And here’s what I realize: she would never wear mittens shaped like kittens or a dress with a Peter Pan collar. She would never say, Love your dress, if she fucking hated your dress. She would never say, How are you? if she didn’t care how you were. She would never eat a lavender cupcake that tasted like perfume or wear a perfume that made her smell like a cupcake. She would never wear lip balm for cosmetic purposes. She would never wear it unless her lips were seriously, seriously cracked. And even if they were, she’d still put Lady Danger on them, which is the name of her lipstick, this bright blue-red that looks surreally beautiful on her but when I tried it on once made me look insane. Her perfume smells like rain and smoke and her eye makeup scares small children and she wears pumps even though she’s at least two inches taller than I am and I’m a freak.

He kisses me on the lips. Just once. So light, like a touch of a touch. This time it doesn’t burn. It burns, yes, but not in a bad way. It’s like that wrong heaven of stars up there are all in my body now. Little dots of fiery light. But it doesn’t feel wrong anymore. It feels exactly right. Just like the right heaven.

i think of that spring morning, just before dawn. how she appeared at my side on the bench. how i felt so suddenly alive with possibility. saw in her a wondrous world, an open hand, a person i knew in my bones would be someone i’d love. how i had no idea. how the not knowing was the most wonderful and terrible thing. maybe i could do it again. imagine her back. live on the roofs and trees of my mind with another her beside me forever. take her mesh hand in mine and this time never let go.

I don’t have those hair salon novels anymore. I like to think they were swallowed up in the Falls after she died. In my memory, those years remain my most prolific writing period although I’ve never really not written, never not had another world of my own making to escape to, never known how to be in this world without most of my soul dreaming up and living in another. Until I came here. Sometimes it’s good to take a break, the Lion said to me last January, whisking his tea. Focus on other things. Read. Be a guest in other worlds. Perhaps you’re growing. Evolving. Trust, Samantha. Patience.

Her neighborhood is obscenely beautiful. I cannot help but observe this as I stand on her marbled steps, flanked by stone griffins, beaks open in midscreech. A line of stately houses, a canopy of grandly bowing trees. Just a block from campus, off a poshly quaint street lined with bistros that offer champagne by the glass, cafés that make the cortadas with the ornate foam art that all the faculty drink, shops selling cold-pressed juice and organic dog treats. Unlike my street, which smells of sad man piss, hers smells of autumn leaves.

Because she looks like a cupcake. Dresses like a cupcake. Gives off a scent of baked lemony sugar. Pretty in a way that reminds you of frosting flourishes. Not the forest green and electric blue horrors in the supermarket, but the pastel kind that is used at weddings or tasteful Easter gatherings. She looks so much like a cupcake that when I first met her at orientation, I had a very real desire to eat her. Bite deeply into her white shoulder. Dig a fork in her cheek.

They each look at Ava, then at me, in turn, scanning down from our heads to our feet, their eyes taking us in like little mouths sipping strange drinks. As they do, their noses twitch, their eight eyes do not blink, but stare and stare. Then they look back at the Duchess and lean in to each other, their lip-glossed mouths forming whispery words. Ava squeezes my arm, hard. The Duchess turns and arches an eyebrow at us. She raises a hand up. Is there an invisible gun in it? No. It’s an empty, open hand. With which she then waves. At me. With something like a smile on her face. Hi, her mouth says. My hand shoots up of its own accord before I can even stop myself. I’m waving and waving and waving. Hi, I’m saying with my mouth, even though no sound comes out. Then the rest of the Bunnies hold up a hand and wave too.

I can't just give it away like that, Samantha. I wanted to leave it open...to interpretation." He smiles slightly at the word "interpretation," recalling perhaps key moments in his own genius. "You need to tell me what you did. You need to tell me exactly." "Do I?" He's pissed now. And not a little heard Samantha. I am his audience of one, do I not realize that? The work he put into this thing, the planning. He was expecting frankly for me to be blown away. Instead here I am asking for little annoying details and worse -- explanations. "I mean, why bother if I'm just going to bother telling you exactly? Where's the fun in that? Why bother making art at all?

Samantha Heather Mackey thinks her stories are so fucking great! Samantha Heather Mackey doesn't say it but she thinks she's too good for the whole fucking world! Samantha Heather Mackey acts poor but why then does she behave like a princess? Samantha Heather Mackey slept with her professor! Sucked him off! For preferential treatment! There is no way in hell that Samantha Heather Mackey can be that tall, she wears stilts! Samantha Heather wears stilts so she can look down on us! Oh, ho, ho, ho she loves fucking second of that!! Samantha Heather Mackey thinks we have everything under the sun, that we sleep on a bed of gold, and meanwhile she sleeps on a bed of dirt. That she has nothing, nothing, and she thinks this makes her deep. It doesn't make you deep, Samantha Heather Mackey, it just makes you rumpled and it makes you smell of old potatoes. Samantha Heather Mackey thinks she understands everything, but she fails to understand the depths of the human heart. She fails to understand the depths of our heart. Our hearts our heart our heart! We've read Jane Eyre too, you cunt, and we've read The Waves, and when we read it, you know, we wept for minutes.