“Don’t believe the voices in your head. They come from the people you’re learning to forget.”

“I don’t think people love me. They love versions of me I have spun for them, versions of me they have construed in their minds. The easy versions of me, the easy parts of me to love. Who’s going to love the girl that can’t stop crying? The girl that hurts herself? The girl that is losing control? The girl that is so sad she can’t get out of bed? The girl that keeps pushing everyone away? Who’s going to love the monster in me, who’s going to love me now?”

“I assure you, I am not put together at all. Nor am I broken. I am recovering - finding the beautiful in the ugly and stitching it into my life.”

“Of course I look angry all the time. My entire life I’ve been fighting a war. I am soaked in pain and sadness. The irony however, is that I’m not actually angry, I’m trying to learn how to be happy. And that in itself is a war…”

Laurie Halse Anderson, Speak

“I’m surely going to regret this, she told herself, displaying considerable foresight.”

“There is more to art than aesthetics. There’s bearing witness.”

“You are damaged and broken and unhinged. But so are shooting stars and comets.”

*makes a jerking off motion every time someone with authority talks*

“I feel myself shutting down, closing off, like I should tell people, ‘No, we don’t use this heart anymore. It’s too fragile.”

“There was another life that I might have had, but I am having this one.”

“I was dying to hear someone say That I didn’t need to try so hard to be perfect, That I was enough and it was okay”