“Don’t explain. People only hear what they want to hear.”

“That’s my problem: I think too much, and I feel too deeply. What a dangerous combination.”

"You cannot make everyone think and feel as deeply as you do. This is your tragedy, because you understand them but they do not understand you.”

"Let go, or be dragged.”

♦

“It’s hard to show people everything, you know? You never know what they’ll do with it once they have it.”

♦

“There is an ache in my heart for the imagined beauty of a life I haven’t had, from which I had been locked out, and it never goes away.”

♦

“You cannot make someone understand a message they are not ready to receive.”

♦

"You can fool people. You can fool anybody anytime of the day, but you can’t fool yourself. At night, when you go home, you’ve got to be straight up with you.”

♦

“I keep waiting to be treated badly. Does anyone else do this? Literally every day I think, Today is the day when things will change, when I will overstay my emotional welcome, when this person will decide that treating me well is beyond what I deserve. Every nicety, every act of kindness feels like something I need to lock in a vault. It all makes me realize that my threshold for being treated decently was desperately low for like, all of my adult life. I am full of great advice and lofty standards for my friends. Do this, don’t put up with that. When it comes to myself, it’s like, well, you’re garbage so the rules aren’t the same for you. I get mad at myself when I realize this, when I realize how passive I can be, how I try to be invisible in my own life, how I try to not take up space or require anyone else’s attention or energy.”

“I was with them and yet I was alone.”

"My brain and this world don’t fit each other.”

"At some point you just have to let go of what you thought should happen and live in what is happening.”

"My brain knew, but my heart just wasn’t ready.”

"And yet the only exciting life is the imaginary one.”

♦

"Some lessons are only delivered in the form of pain.”

♦

"I’d begun to grow weary of my constant daydreaming because, as I retreated more often into fantasy, it had become a reminder of my growing discontent with real life.”

♦

"the things we fear the most have already happened to us."

♦

"I’m not used to being loved. I wouldn’t know what to do.”

♦

“There are some people who never realize.”

♦

"People will kill you over time, and how they’ll kill you is with tiny, harmless phrases, like “be realistic.”

♦

"There comes a time when you look into the mirror and you realize that what you see is all that you will ever be. And then you accept it. Or you kill yourself. Or you stop looking in mirrors.”

♦

"Be careful who you vent to.”

♦

"I said I would go to hell for you, but I didn’t expect you to leave me there.”

♦

"Those who are heartless once cared too much.”

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"You almost convinced me I mattered.”

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"I felt too much, he didn’t.”

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"My memories make me vomit”

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"Mental illness is like fighting a war where the enemy’s strategy is to convince you that the war isn’t actually happening."

♦

"I never felt open in any way. I would never impulsively ring people and assume that they’d want to see me, or just go ‘round. I always had to sit down and think very hard before I knocked on anybody’s door. And consequently, I never really knocked."

♦

"Remembering is only a new form of suffering.”

♦

"At a certain point, I just have to try not to think too much about certain things, or else they’ll break my heart.”

♦

"Some old wounds never truly heal, and bleed again at the slightest word.”

♦

"I’m full of love, and nobody wants it.”

♦

"Nothing can wear you out like caring about people.”

♦

"But dreams are like a drug: the magic doesn’t last and then the pain is worse than knives.”

♦

"You held on to something that never held on to you, and that was the problem.”

♦

"People aren’t always going to be there for you, that’s why you learn to handle things on your own.”

♦

"Attachment leads to suffering.”

♦

"I am overwhelmed with things I ought to have written about and never found the proper words.”

♦

"I began to bawl because I had everything I wanted and knew I would never be so happy again.”

♦

"The people I have loved in my life have never been easy to love. I’m not used to normal. I’m used to disaster.”

♦

"I shiver, thinking how easy it is to be totally wrong about people, to see one tiny part of them and confuse it for the whole.”

♦

"Suicidal feelings are not the same as giving up on life. Suicidal feelings often express a powerful and overwhelming need for a different life. Suicidal feelings can mean, in a desperate and unyielding way, a demand for something new. Listen to someone who is suicidal and you often hear a need for change so important, so indispensable, that they would rather die than go on living without the change. And when the person feels powerless to make that change happen, they become suicidal.Help comes when the person identifies the change they want and starts to believe it can actually happen. Whether it is overcoming an impossible family situation, making a career or study change, standing up to an oppressor, gaining relief from chronic physical pain, igniting creative inspiration, feeling less alone, or beginning to value their self worth, at the root of suicidal feelings is often powerlessness to change your life – not giving up on life itself.”

♦

"I won’t ever leave you, even though you’re always leaving me.”

♦

"Do not tell everyone your story. You will only end up feeling more rejected. People cannot give you what you long for in your heart.”

♦

"You can decorate absence however you want―but you’re still going to feel what’s missing.”

♦

"Be very, very careful what you put into that head, because you’ll never, ever get it out.”

♦

"I used to think the worst thing in life was to end up all alone. It’s not. The worst thing in life is to end up with people who make you feel all alone.”

♦

"Suicide is just a moment. This is how she described it to me. For just a moment, it doesn’t matter that you’ve got people who love you and the sun is shining and there’s a movie coming out this weekend that you’ve been dying to see. It hits you all of a sudden that nothing is ever going to be okay, ever, and you kind of dare yourself. You pick up a knife and press it gently to your skin, you look out a nineteenth-story window and you think, I could just do it. I could just do it. And most of the time, you look at the height and you get scared, or you think about the poor people on the sidewalk below - what if there are kids coming home from school and they have to spend the rest of their lives trying to forget this terrible thing you’re going to make them see? And the moment’s over. You think about how sad it would’ve been if you never got to see that movie, and you look at your dog and wonder who would’ve taken care of her if you had gone. And you go back to normal. But you keep it there in your mind. Even if you never take yourself up on it, it gives you a kind of comfort to know that the day is yours to choose. You tuck it away in your brain like sour candy tucked in your cheek, and the puckering memory it leaves behind, the rough pleasure of running your tongue over its strange terrain, is exactly the same. The day was hers to choose, and perhaps in that treetop moment when she looked down and saw the yard, the world, her life, spread out below her, perhaps she chose to plunge toward it headlong. Perhaps she saw before her a lifetime of walking on the ruined earth and chose instead a single moment in the air.”

♦

"Perhaps – I want the old days back again and they’ll never come back, and I am haunted by the memory of them…"

♦

"Why didn’t I learn to treat everything like it was the last time. My greatest regret was how much I believed in the future."

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"Despite how open, peaceful, and loving you attempt to be, people can only meet you as deeply as they have met themselves.”

♦

"She is so young and at the same time like a dead person. She knows this.”