Patricia Mccormick Quotes

Look. I have a strategy. Why expect anything? If you don’t expect anything, you don’t get disappointed.

Simply to endure is to triumph.

I imagine you working on me as an algebra problem, reducing me to fractions, crossing out common denominators, until there's nothing left on the page but a line that says x = whatever it is that is wrong with me.

If you look hard enough, chaos turns into order the way letters turn into words.

This affliction--hope--is so cruel and stubborn, I believe it will kill me

Trying to remember, I have learned, is like trying to clutch a handful of fog. Trying to forget, like trying to hold back the monsoon.

Sometimes when we’re in situations where we feel we’re not in control, we do things, especially things that take a lot of energy, as a way of making ourselves feel we have some power.

Instead, we linger over a luxury that costs nothing: Imagining what may be.

You show you care, you die. You show you fear, you die. You show nothing, maybe you live.

Inside my head I carry: my baby goat, my baby brother, my ama's face, our family's future. My bundle is light. My burden is heavy.

Guard the portals of your mind.

Then I place the blade next to the skine on my palm. A tingle arced across my scalp. The flood tipped up at me and my body spiraled away. Then I was on the ceiling looking down, waiting to see what would happen next. What happened next was thet a perfect, straight line of blood bloomed from under the blade.The line grow into a long, Fat bubbel, A lush crimson bubbel that got bigger and bigger. I watch from above, waiting to see how big it would get before it burst. when it did, I felt awesome. Satisfied, finally. Then exhausted.

Long time I been on my own, but now really I'm alone. I survive the killing, the starving, all the hate of the Khmer Rouge, but I think maybe now I will die of this, of broken heart.

My bundle is light. My burden is heavy.

People who aren't asleep when Ruby comes around have to take sleeping pills. Everyone is afraid of those pills- even the substance- abuse guests.

When I have run out of words to copy, I look out the window at this strange place called India. Inside the train, the people around me are snoring. I don't understand how they can close their eyes when there is so much to see.

Then I placed the blade next to the skin on my palm. A tingle arched across my scalp. The floor tipped up at me and my body spilled away. Then I was on the ceiling looking down, waiting to see what would happen next...

A man who doles out sweets, and slaps, with the same hand.

I have been beaten here, locked away, violated a hundred times and a hundred times more. I have been starved and cheated, tricked and disgraced. How odd it is that I am undone by the simple kindness of a small boy with a yellow pencil.

Most of all, I am afraid of life outside this place

A KIND OF ILLNESS This ache in my chest is a relentless thing, worse than any fever. A fever is gone with a few of Mumtaz's white pills. But this illness has had me in its grip for a week now. This affliction--hope--is so cruel and stubborn, I believe it will kill me.

Ama wipes her hands on her apron, looks up at our old roof with new eyes, and lifts the baby from his basket. She twirls him in the air, her skirts flying around her ankles the way the clouds swirl around the mountain cap--her laughter fresh and strange and musical to my ears.

In the evening, the brilliant yellow pumpkin blossoms will close, drunk on sunshine, while the milky white jasmine will open their slender throats and sip the chill Himalayan air. At night, low hearths will send up wispy curls of smoke fragrant with a dozen dinners, and darkness will clothe the land. Except on nights when the moon is full. On those nights, the hillside and the valley below are bathed in a magical white light, the glow of the perpetual snows that blanket the mountaintops. On those nights I lie restless in the sleeping loft, wondering what the world is like beyond my mountain home.

Back at the hut, all my sister, they start to cry. "No crying," my aunt says, very strict. "You cry only in your mind." But later, when everyone else asleep, I hear my aunt, her tears, they fall like rain.

That first phrase-please bless me, Father, for I have sinned-was so humbling and so total, Matt always felt a kind of absolution as soon as he said it

Rochelle," she calls out, still looking at me. "Is there anyone down at the desk? I need something." I'm too startled to move. Is she going to tell on me, get me in trouble? Rochelle's gotten up; she's banging the toilet stall doors open one by one, checking to make sure no one's in there. When the last stall turns up empty, she gives Amanda an annoyed look. "What do you need this time of night?" Amanda smiles at me, then turns to face Rochelle. "A tampon

Hey, S.T.," Sydney says finally. I don't budge. She nudges me with her elbow. "You want to know something?" I still can't look up. But I nod. "It's not your fault either." She says this like it's not big deal. Like it's nothing. But it's everything.

i inhale deeply, drinking the warmth in the scent of mountain sunshine, a warmth that smells of freshly turned soil and clean laundry baking in the sun.

I have been beaten here, locked away, violated a hundred times, and a hundred times more. I have been starved, and cheated, tricked and disgraced. How odd is it that I am undone by the simple kindness of a small boy with a yellow pencil.

Auntie says that in the city, people gather and pay money to see beautiful women and handsome men put on a show. The people in the show are called movie stars.

To be faithful, he wrote, a person had to be concerned less about himself and more about caring for his neighbor.

Silence in the face of evil is itself evil,” he would later write. “Not to speak is to speak. Not to act is to act.”2

In the evening, the brilliant yellow pumpkin blossoms will close, drunk on sunshine, while the milky white jasmine will open their slender throats and sip the chill Himalayan air.

At night, low hearths will send up wispy curls of smoke fragrant with a dozen dinners, and darkness will clothe the land.

A son will always be a son, they say. But a girl is like a goat. Good as long as she gives you milk and butter. But not worth crying over when it's time to make a stew.

I ask Ama why. "Why," I say, "must women suffer so?" "This has always been our fate," she says. "Simply to endure," she says, "is to triumph.

You do not need outside approval. You came into this life pre-approved!

All the time you fighting, you think only of how to survive. All the time you survive, you wonder why you don’t die. But now my life can be something different. Now, in America, I don’t have to fight. I don’t have to survive. I can chose a new thing: to live.

Each year, nearly 12,000 Nepali girls are sold by their families, intentionally o r unwittingly, into a life of sexual slavery in the brothels of India. W orldwide , the U.S. State D epartmen t estimates that nearly half a millio n children are trafficked into the sex trade annually.

I don’t know what this is, this Revolution. But I think maybe this guy not too smart. The rich, they chase you if you steal their things. Poor people, they the one who share.   Three

But for me, it feels like nighttime even in the brightest sun without my friend.

she is bent under the weight of her burden

A son will always be a son, they say. But a girl is like a goat. Good as long as she gives you milk and butter. But not worth crying over when it's time to make a stew

But sometimes, I hate myself for hating him. Simply because he is an ordinary boy.

If yo u loo k hard eno ugh, chaos turns into o rder the way letters turn into wo rds.

Simply to end ure," she says, "is to triumph.

Trying to remember, I have learned , is like trying to clutch a handful of fog. Trying to forget, like trying to hold back the mons

A son will always be a son, they say. But a girl is like a goat. Good as long as she gives you milk and butter. But not worth crying over when it’s time to make a stew.

This is also the season when the women drink the blue-black juice of the marking nut tree to do away with the babies in their wombs—the ones who would be born only to be buried next season.

Four other babies were born between me and my brother. There are no notches for them.

This has always been our fate,” she says. “Simply to endure,” she says, “is to triumph.

I nod yes-no-yes-no and run back to Ama, afraid to tell her about this new auntie who smells of amber and jasmine and possibility.

Wenn ich jetzt falle, stehe ich nie wieder auf. Also gehe ich weiter.

trying to clutch a handful of fog. Trying to forget, like trying to hold back the monsoon.

And so I consider a world so ugly that a child would be maimed for life to fetch an extra rupee or two. And another world full of brides and marigolds, rain machines and white horses.

If you look hard enough , chaos turns into order the way letters turn into words .

Now that Gita is gone, to work as a maid for a wealthy woman in the city, her family has a tiny glass sun that hangs from a wire in the middle of their ceiling, a new set of pots for Gita's mother, a pair of spectacles for her father, a brocaded wedding dress for her older sister, and school fees for her little brother. Inside Gita's family hut, it is daytime at night. But for me, it feels like nighttime even in the brightest sun without my friend.