Quotes from work

Wintergirls

“I knew it!" He pumps a fist into the air. "You've fallen in love with me. You want to have my babies. We'll get a team of horses and a covered wagon and we'll journey to South America and raise goats.”

“I want to go to sleep and not wake up, but I don't want to die. I want to eat like a normal person eats, but I need to see my bones or I will hate myself even more and I might cut my heart out or take every pill that was ever made.”

“Eating was hard. Breathing was hard. Living was hardest.”

“Do I want to die from the inside out or the outside in?”

“I understood what triggered her earthquakes, most of them.”

“I am thawing.”

“We turned us into wintergirls, and when she tried to leave, I pulled her back into the snow because I was afraid to be alone.”

“You’re not dead, but you’re not alive, either. You’re a wintergirl.”

“I'm learning how to taste everything.”

“Emma is a mattress who got thrown off the truck when her parents split up. It's not like you can blame a mattress when people don't tie it down tight enough.”

“You’re not dead,
but you’re not alive, either. You’re a wintergirl, Lia-Lia,
caught in between the worlds. You’re a ghost with a beat-
ing heart. Soon you’ll cross the border and be with me.
I’m so stoked. I miss you wicked.”

“I failed eating, failed drinking, failed not cutting myself into shreds. Failed friendship. Failed sisterhood and daughterhood. Failed mirrors and scales and phone calls. Good thing I'm stable.”

“When you're alive, people can hurt you. It's easier to crawl into a bone cage or a snowdrift of confusion. It's easier to lock everybody out.

But it's a lie.”

“Dead girl walking” the boys say in the halls.
“Tell us your secrets” the girls whisper, one toilet to another.
"I am that girl. I am the spaces between my thighs, daylight shinning through. I am the bones they want, wired on a porcelain frame.”

“I keep thinking that if I could just unzip my skin, step out of this body, then I would see who I really am.“ She nods her head slowly. „What do you think you‘d look like?” “Smaller, for a start.”

“I am angry that I starved my brain and that I sat shivering in my bed at night instead of dancing or reading poetry or eating ice cream or kissing a boy…”

“I am learning how to be angry and sad and lonely and joyful and excited and afraid and happy.”

“For one moment we are not failed tests and broken condoms and cheating on essays; we are crayons and lunch boxes and swinging so high our sneakers punch holes in the clouds.”

“What do I want?
The answer to that question does not exist.”