Emma Forrest Quotes

#1. But I saw the pain and sadness in everything, and swirled it round my mouth like a fine wine.

Emma Forrest

#2. He was a super shiny boy and I liked the shape of him. Under the blanket. In the shower. I liked his shadow on the street and his imprint on the sofa. I hated the smell of hair gel on his head, but I loved it on the pillow. I love the smell of losing someone.

Emma Forrest

#3. Every fear, every night terror, every hour I cried for Liev, every fight with Sebastian is registered as a neat white scar.

Emma Forrest

#4. I like the cuts - they comfort me - I can't lie.

Emma Forrest

#5. People don't know. We don't know ourselves so we tell ourselves what we really know is other people. We could say the depth of pain we feel for the lovers who've left us is because we knew them so well.

Emma Forrest

#6. No one ever loved you like him.
And no one ever took it away so completely.
But it's here.
Look around.

Emma Forrest

#7. We intersect. He says he thanks every star that we existed on the same celestial plain. But here we are on earth, dirty, well used, a man-made throughway for intersecting dreams.

Emma Forrest

#8. I still believe that you truly find yourself
not in travel, but in other human souls.

Emma Forrest

#9. I don't want to go to university. I don't like unity and I hate verses. I just love the choruses of songs.

Emma Forrest

#10. [ ... ] my quirks had gone beyond eccentricity, past the warm waters of weird to those cold, deep patches of sea where people lose their lives.

Emma Forrest

#11. In other words, it was a struggle with himself. And the product of that struggle: anger, bitterness, resentment, envy or transformation, aspiration, hope, decency..the product of that struggle is the quality of your life and the nature of your soul.

Emma Forrest

#12. You can have this kind of love. You can have it.
You just grab it. Of course the problem with
having that love is that you can lose it, too.

Emma Forrest

#13. He says he thanks every star the we existed on the same clestial plain. But here we are on earth, dirty, well used, a man made throughaway for intersecting dreams.

Emma Forrest

#14. I'm not rich, though everybody thinks I am.

Emma Forrest

#15. New York is the first place I have ever felt safe.

Emma Forrest

#16. Jeff Bridges says that the reason he's one of the few stars in Hollywood whose made his marriage last for decades is that every time they think there's no more doors left to walk through in the room, they just keep looking and keep looking until they find one.

Emma Forrest

#17. When he kisses me, I cry. I explain it's not because I wish he were someone else, it's because it's such a shock to the system to be desired after feeling so completely abandoned.

Emma Forrest

#18. Bad people very often do one good thing.

Emma Forrest

#19. There is something deeply unsettling about a child crying insincerely.

Emma Forrest

#20. You could be together forever, but one of you is going to have to go first. I want it to last. I love him and I want it to stay.

Emma Forrest

#21. Are you mine?"
Yes.
"Are you mine?"
Yes.
"Are you mine?"
No.
"No?"
No. I loved being yours. But now I'm mine, which is all I ever was, in the end.

Emma Forrest

#22. Well. There is a psychiatric occurrence we see in men-not often women-where they put all their hopes and dreams onto one person, so intensely that at some point it trips a wire in the brain circuitry, and that causes them to go, in a minute, 180 degrees the other way.

Emma Forrest

#23. We're born alone and we die alone, but we get to travel with people along the way, and if you get lucky, you have a worthy consort.

Emma Forrest

#24. My thoughts are messy, my emotions are messy, my body goes in and out at will. The raised white scars on my arms and legs are the only aspect of my being that comes close to minimalism. They came from chaos, but it is hard to carve frustration and unease into the flesh. Only straight lines.

Emma Forrest

#25. The problem with writing a book about bulimia is that whenever you go to the washroom, people think you're throwing up.

Emma Forrest

#26. Accepting the presidency, Barack introduces "my best friend of sixteen years, the love of my life, Michelle Obama" and I think I will pass out.
That, right there, is love in action.

Emma Forrest

#27. I enjoy films where two characters are coming of age, just different ages. That's why I love 'Paper Moon' so much.

Emma Forrest

#28. I want you to stay.
I never want there to be a time
when we don't share space.

Emma Forrest

#29. I would say at the moment the only person who could have played me this past year would have to be Angelina Jolie.

Emma Forrest

#30. When I was younger I loved Betty Blue, and at the moment I'm completely besotted with Angelina Jolie. But sometimes I'm unnerved by the idea of men liking her. Because I think that there is a side to every man that really wants to watch a woman fall apart.

Emma Forrest

#31. My radar, after all these years of sanity, is still off when it comes to what people do or don't mean.

Emma Forrest

#32. At least you know where you are with blood. At least other people can see it.

Emma Forrest

#33. The goal was to get sane, to get whole, to be complete enough to support someone else.

Emma Forrest

#34. It took a long time, but my heart now feels full when I think of him. When you fall in love again - which I have - it's funny the other things that come back in with that open-ness. You have this ghost chorus of the lovers who came before, but they're benign now, they're good spirits.

Emma Forrest

#35. Write a page every single day, even if what you put on the page that day is no good - it's the only way to get better.

Emma Forrest

#36. I wish I had been less keen to inject my own opinions, but I was a teenager and your teenage self is generally an idiot compared to the adult you. That's the way it should be. If it's the other way around, you have a problem.

Emma Forrest

#37. Now that he's gone, I feel like I'm a senior citizen who gave away her life savings over the phone.
And this is the crux: I never in my life believed in someone as much as I believed in him.
The shame is overwhelming.

Emma Forrest

#38. I'm not crazy or dangerous,
just a bit eccentric and lonely.

Emma Forrest

#39. I think about pasta in the shape of Hello Kitty, stockings with diamond seams up the back, Marilyn's crumbling cake-mascara, and Liz Taylor's new white hair. I haven't got time for the trivials.

Emma Forrest

#40. There's so much guilt there attached to having a perfectly good life.

Emma Forrest

#41. When he asked if he was mine, tears in his eyes,
I think he knew what he would do,
what he would have to do,
and he was mourning us.
He was mourning us the whole time.

Emma Forrest

#42. When I was old enough to know better, I ate a bar of soap in the shape of the Muppets' Fozzie Bear, because I loved him so much I wanted to consume him, even if doing so made me ill. I didn't yet know the word 'foreshadowing.' Fozzie was the only first of many pop-culture icons I feel shaped by.

Emma Forrest

#43. Time heals all wounds. And if it doesn't, you name them something other than wounds and agree to let them stay.

Emma Forrest

#44. Since I'm a cat who doesn't know what I am, I wear track pants with old-skool Nikes but Gina Lollobrigida skintight sweaters. I am caught between childhood and va-va-voom.

Emma Forrest

#45. [ ... ] at least my face moves when you look at it. At least I know I'm a fool.

Emma Forrest

#46. Yes, I have patterns of love addiction.
But I'm a woman.
Of course I do.

Emma Forrest

#47. I'm in love with someone good and kind and gentle, and he's seen the darkness too, but somehow we've become each other's light.

Emma Forrest

#48. Cyndi Lauper was hilarious and generous, someone I'd loved from childhood who didn't disappoint.

Emma Forrest

#49. When you live with voices in your head, you are drawn inextricably to voices outside your head. Very often the voices work to confirm your worst suspicions. Or think of things you could never have imagined! There are only so many hours of the day to hate yourself.

Emma Forrest

#50. I used to devour biographies of people like Natalie Wood and Marilyn.

Emma Forrest

#51. It's as if he can no longer acknowledge the love he felt or the pain I am in. I have been dismissed. I don't think I was smarter or as beautiful as the other girls he did this to. It's just that I was me. It was all I had.

Emma Forrest

#52. I think I've lost my faith
and I can't stop writing
because I don't know how
much longer I can hold on.

Emma Forrest

#53. Of course he freaked me out.
Of course it's nothing to do with me.
But none of that matters.
He loved me and now he doesn't.
I was everything to him and now I am nothing.

Emma Forrest

#54. At the exit, they sell home-made soap with the evil eye attached, to protect yourself from people who'd wish you ill. I buy one, wondering, How do you hang it inside yourself?

Emma Forrest

#55. He was only twenty-five.He was young enough to miss his youth just as it was slipping away. The worst kind of loss-the one that is happening as you feel it.

Emma Forrest

#56. It's all in her walk, a cartoon swagger. Part Jayne Mansfield, part Muhammad Ali. Men never know if it's an invitation upstairs or an invitation outside.

Emma Forrest

#57. You do it how you can do it,
so long as it's getting done,
you're okay.

Emma Forrest

#58. And then, with the feather-green darkness pressed against the windows, he puts his filthy fingers on my scrubbed hope face and says, "If I kiss you, it's all over." And then he does. And then it is.

Emma Forrest

#59. The truth is I have had, for whatever reason, several movie-star boyfriends.

Emma Forrest

#60. You want to know, but are afraid to ask, whether or not I found someone. If there could be anyone to fill that hole in my heart after I lost him. I did.
"Life is futile," says my new therapist, Michaela,
"and no one gets out of it alive. There is only love.

Emma Forrest

#61. Everyone asks about how I'll feel about the tattoos and scars in thirty years. I always say: "I'll like them." I've always loved damaged monuments, in architecture and in humans.

Emma Forrest

#62. I wanted to know how ugly I could get, how ruined and ugly and spoiled, before they stopped trying to fuck me. I didn't think they'd ever notice. Nobody had so far. Because I was still in the shape of a beautiful girl. Although I behaved like an ugly one.

Emma Forrest

#63. If killing yourself is not an option anymore,
you have to sink into the darkness instead,
and make something out of it.

Emma Forrest

#64. Let me tell you something: when you dance, you are the greatest dancer who has ever lived. And when you sing, you will have the courage to raise your voice to the heavens, knowing that you may never get an answer.

Emma Forrest

#65. In hindsight, I have no idea why he was ever with me. He thought highly of my breasts. And ... that's it, I think.

Emma Forrest