“The woman you’re becoming will cost you people, relationships, spaces and material things.. Choose her over everything.”

"I was used to using selective amnesia as a weapon in my life with others. To forget what I want, to remember what I want.. a skill I perfected for many years, until it became an instinctual behaviour, one that requires no thinking.”

“…this year,
 yanking off all past years,
 I took the bait
 and was pulled upward, upward,
 into the sky and was held by the sun —
the quick wonder of its yellow lap —
and became a woman who learned her own skin 
and dug into her soul and found it full.”

"You are the most dangerous kind of female the world can ever know. You carry the seeds for your own destruction and the destruction of everyone who loves you. And a great many will love you for your beautiful face for your seductive body; but you will fail them all because you will believe they all fail you first. You are an idealist of the worst kind - the romantic idealist. Born to destroy and self destruct."

“The most feared woman in the world is the woman who not only loves herself unapologetically, but the woman who self-validates her very own existence.”

“Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.”

“I have cried so hard that my mother swore I cracked the sky. I have emptied bottles down my throat and felt my wrists erupt like volcanoes. I have clawed at the surface of my skin to free myself of the burden that is my own body. I have been left by a lover who did not love me with my clothes off; he told me that it burnt every time his palm traced over my thighs and he could feel every reason I had ever carved a line into my skin. I have walked through fire and met ghosts more full of life than myself. Do not tell me that I am not strong, so long as I am still breathing.”

“Don’t look away. Look straight at everything. Look it all in the eye, good and bad.”

“You don’t have to let go of anything. You have to realize that everything has let go of you. You are not attached to anything in reality. Everything will die and change regardless of your love and attachment.”

“It’s not my responsibility to be beautiful. I’m not alive for that purpose. My existence is not about how desirable you find me.”

“What is to give light must endure burning.”

“If I am a witch, then so be it, I said. And I took to eating black things - huitlacoche the corn mushroom, coffee, dark chiles, the bruised part of fruit, the darkest, blackest things to make me hard and strong.”

“Nitre, vitriol, cinnabar, alum, salt ammoniac, sublimated mercury, rock salt, alcali salt, common salt, rock alum, alum schist, arsenic, sublimate, realgar, tartar, orpiment, verdegris.”

“Don’t get mad. Don’t get even. Do better. Much better. Rise above. Become so engulfed in your own success that you forget it ever happened.”

“You invite things to happen. You open the door. You inhale. And if you inhale the chaos, you give the chaos, the chaos gives back.”

“Don’t Take Anything Personally. Nothing others do is because of you. What others say and do is a projection of their own reality, their own dream. When you are immune to the opinions and actions of others, you won’t be the victim of needless suffering.”

“She's got everything she needs, she's an artist. She don't look back.”

“Not everything is supposed to become something beautiful and long-lasting. Sometimes people come into your life to show you what is right and what is wrong, to show you who you can be, to teach you to love yourself, to make you feel better for a little while, or to just be someone to walk with at night and spill your life to. Not everyone is going to stay forever, and we still have to keep on going and thank them for what they’ve given us.”

“Everyone is my teacher. Some I seek. Some I subconsciously attract. Often I learn simply by observing others. Some may be completely unaware that I’m learning from them, yet I bow deeply in gratitude.”

“I closed my mouth and spoke to you in a hundred silent ways.”

“Melancholy is a sensual pleasure that is deliberately provoked. How many people shut themselves away to make themselves sadder, or to weep beside a stream, or choose a sentimental book! We are constantly building and unbuilding ourselves.”

"There is immeasurably more left inside than what comes out in words."

“Of course I am not worried about intimidating men. The type of man who will be intimidated by me is exactly the type of man I have no interest in.”

"Enough to hold you to the brightest of lights, to place you dangerously close to that sun, more than enough to put my name behind my ideals, and neglect my logic twice daily."

"Conciousness is a congenital hallucination."

"Sail your boat into my waters, you're all that calms me down, sail your boat into my waters, crash and sink like the others."

“It’s dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them. I was so preposterously serious in those days…Lightly, lightly—it’s the best advice ever given me. So throw away your baggage and go forward. There are quicksands all about you, sucking at your feet, trying to suck you down into fear and self-pity and despair. That’s why you must walk so lightly. Lightly, my darling.”

"The future lies before you, like paths of pure white snow. Be careful how you tread it, for every step will show."

"No matter how good she looks, someone somewhere is tired of her shit"

"The vessel fills up to the brim sloshing motions, nausea within."

“In a fleshy tomb, I am buried above ground.”

"Only when the last tree has died and the last river been poisoned and the last fish been caught we will realize we cannot eat money."

“Before you diagnose yourself with depression or low self esteem, first make sure that you are not, in fact, just surrounding yourself with assholes.”

"The only obsession everyone wants: ‘love.’ People think that in falling in love they make themselves whole? The Platonic union of souls? I think otherwise. I think you’re whole before you begin. And the love fractures you. You’re whole, and then you’re cracked open."

"It’s easy to take off your clothes and have sex. People do it all the time. But opening up your soul to someone, letting them into your spirits, thoughts, fears, future, hopes, dreams….that is being naked.”

"I give myself very good advice, but I very seldom follow it, That explains the trouble that I'm always in."

“My solitude doesn’t depend on the presence or absence of people; on the contrary, I hate who steals my solitude without, in exchange, offering me true company.”

“No matter how far you travel, you can never get away from yourself.”

"The thought ‘Who am I?’ will destroy all other thoughts, and like the stick used for stirring the burning pyre, it will itself in the end get destroyed. Then, there will arise Self-realization."

“I can never read all the books I want; I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want. I can never train myself in all the skills I want. And why do I want? I want to live and feel all the shades, tones and variations of mental and physical experience possible in life. And I am horribly limited.”

“We forget we’re mostly water till the rain falls and every atom in our body starts to go home”

"But she did look back, and I love her for that, because it was so human. So she was turned to a pillar of salt. So it goes. People aren’t supposed to look back. I’m certainly not going to do it anymore."

“As an artist you have to have a certain amount of arrogance.”

“Ideas cannot be owned. They belong to whomever understands them.”

"I tried to distance myself from an alienist. I failed and he won. I am now encumbered with a foreign notion called 'emotion'."

"To be understood is to prostitute yourself."

"I am lonely, yet not everybody will do. I don’t know why, some people fill the gaps and others emphasize my loneliness. In reality those who satisfy me are those who simply allow me to live with my ”idea of them."

"What is real is not the external form, but the essence of things."

"He who does not understand your silence will probably not understand your words."

"In the world through which I travel I am endlessly creating myself."

"Time has told me you're a rare find, a troubled cure for a troubled mind."

Beauty is like a rotten tooth. It rubs against your tongue, hurting, insisting on its importance. Finally you go to a dentist and have it pulled. Then you look at the small bloody tooth in your hand and say, ‘Is that all it was?’

"I've always hated being gossiped about. When I heard that people were talking about me, I consoled myself with what my mother used to say: 'Birds peck at the best fruit.'"

"Floating in a peaceful sea, rescued by a sinking ship."

"What a strange illusion it is to suppose that beauty is goodness."

"Let us consider two important factors, the two poles of the creation of art: the artist on one hand, and on the other the spectator who later becomes the posterity; to all appearances the artist acts like a mediumistic being who, from the labyrinth beyond time and space, seeks his way out to a clearing."

"It is painfully easy to define human beings. They are beings who, for no good reason at all, create their own unnecessary suffering."

“Her lips drink water but her heart drinks wine.”

"when you look for something, look somewhere else"

“Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.”

"What is essential is invisible to the eye"

"The insatiable thirst revealed in life for all that is beyond is the most vivid proof of immortality."

"The impulse to expose himself to marginal situations had nothing to do with a desire to produce art - the question as to whether this was art driven by a need to find the most powerful means of expression and the intensest mode of living. For him the most potent expression was in the human scream - both of pain and liberation."

“My heart wants roots. My mind wants wings. I cannot bear their bickerings.”

"Anyone who lives within their means suffers from a lack of imagination."

"If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite."

"He who wants a rose must respect the thorn."

“It’s a strange thing, how you can love somebody, how you can be all eaten up inside with needing them—and they simply don’t need you. That’s all there is to it, and neither of you can do anything about it. And they’ll be the same way with someone else, and someone else will be the same way about you and it goes on and on—this desperate need—and only once in a rare million do the same two people need each other.”

“Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.”

"It's more interesting to have just a picture of a small detail - then you can dream all the rest around it. Because when you see the whole thing, what is there to imagine?"

"If you stick a knife in my back nine inches and pull it out six inches, that's not progress. The progress is healing the wound that the blow made. They won't even admit the knife is there."

"In order to understand myself, I destroyed myself."

"Still dreaming of forever visceral irrepressible irreducible alive."

“be easy. take your time. you are coming home to yourself.”

“Her heart was a secret garden and the walls were very high.”

“The best thing about the bedroom was the bed. I liked to stay in bed for hours, even during the day with covers pulled up to my chin. It was good in there, nothing ever occurred in there, no people, nothing.”

“Just because someone desires you, does not mean that they value you. Read it over. Again. Let those words resonate in your mind.”

"'What are you?' 'To define is to limit.'"

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