Caroline Kettlewell Quotes

#1. For some reason, I believed that I had above all else an obligation to protect everyone
my teachers, my family
from the knowledge of my cutting. What they did not know would not cause them pain.

Caroline Kettlewell

#2. The fear of an unknown never resolves, because the unknown expands infinitely outward, leaving you to cling pitifully to any small shelter of the known: a cracker has twelve calories; the skin, when cut, bleeds.

Caroline Kettlewell

#3. My unhappiness precluded all else; unhappiness is a kind of narcissism, in which nothing that does not resonate with your unhappiness can interest you.

Caroline Kettlewell

#4. Why can't I remember our family Christmas, or a warm spring day, or anything that might have been pleasant? It is as though the filter of recall is itself altered, so that it blocks out everything but the darkest colors of the spectrum.

Caroline Kettlewell

#5. The chaos in my head spun itself into a silk of silence. I had distilled myself to the immediacy of hand, blade, blood, flesh.

Caroline Kettlewell

#6. I have drawn the line, and I am still on this side of it.

Caroline Kettlewell

#7. I needed cutting now the way a diabetic needs insulin. It was a bulwark, steady and unyielding, I could throw up against the insidious, corrosive lapping of a whispering sea of uneasiness.

Caroline Kettlewell

#8. Anorexia isn't about being fat, it's about having fat.

Caroline Kettlewell

#9. How gratifying it is to amuse. How easy it gets to toss off a witticism to ease any awkwardness, to sidestep any solemnity. When you amuse, it even seems, for the briefest possible moment that you are who you appear to be, so clever and confident and at ease.

Caroline Kettlewell

#10. That's when I wanted to cut. I cut to quiet the cacophony. I cut to end this abstracted agony, to reel my selves back to one present and physical whole, whose blood was the proof of her tangibility.

Caroline Kettlewell