Quotes from Sickened: The Memoir of a Munchausen by Proxy Childhood

244 pages

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“I start to see that I surround myself with broken people; more broken than me. Ah, yes, let me count your cracks. Let's see, one hundred, two... yes, you'll do nicely. A cracked companion makes me look more whole, gives me something outside myself to care for. When I'm with whole, healed people I feel my own cracks, the shatters, the insanities of dislocation in myself.”
― quote from Sickened: The Memoir of a Munchausen by Proxy Childhood


“But the memories that hang heaviest are the easiest to recall. They hold in their creases the ability to change one's life, organically, forever. Even when you shake them out, they've left permanent wrinkles in the fabric of your soul.”
― quote from Sickened: The Memoir of a Munchausen by Proxy Childhood


“Books are my friends, where it's okay to be silent, where you're not a freak if you don't want to get drunk, peel out in the parking lot, tip cows.”
― quote from Sickened: The Memoir of a Munchausen by Proxy Childhood


“When I look in the fridge, I see groceries, but I don't see food. My stomach growls; but there is no appetite.

Appetite and hunger are different. Appetite is the mental prompting that kicks the auto-response into drive so you actually reach out, take the food, put it in your mouth, chew, and swallow. I learned this in my first psychology course. Eating isn't just a physical need; it starts in the mind, generating hunger, which then should trigger the body to ingest food. I have no sparks between these plugs.”
― quote from Sickened: The Memoir of a Munchausen by Proxy Childhood


“But the memories that hang heaviest are the easiest to recall.”
― quote from Sickened: The Memoir of a Munchausen by Proxy Childhood



“As long as I'm between home and the clinic I do all right. But out in the real world, I feel like prey. I slink around and can feel people looking at me. I feel their eyes boring into me. I feel what they're thinking: Watch her, she could go off anytime. But within the walls of my farmhouse, I climb out of the protective shell, my arms slowly rise like a phoenix, and I dance, wail, fly around the room and then collapse, crying, in front of my mirrors. I start to see in the mirror what it is I really look like, instead of what I was trained from the womb to see. I do not write about it. I do not talk about it. I do not know what I am doing. But just like a baby bird, I am blinking once-sealed eyes and unfolding damp wings. I cannot articulate the past. A part of me knows it's there, lurking, just behind what I can acknowledge, but it is not within sight. And I am keeping it that way. ”
― quote from Sickened: The Memoir of a Munchausen by Proxy Childhood


“I am going to shrink and shrink until I am a dry fall leaf, complete with a translucent spine and brittle veins, blowing away in a stiff wind, up, up, up into a crisp blue sky.”
― quote from Sickened: The Memoir of a Munchausen by Proxy Childhood


“But Dad, you were a grown man, you have got to take responsibility for what you did, too! I mean, you made me eat [snotty] Kleenex, Dad! For Christ's sake, you can't do that to a little girl! You have got to say you're sorry for the stuff you did as a grown man!'
'Well,' Dad snorts, 'I musta done something right! 'Cause you never left any snot rags lying around the house again, now, did you?”
― quote from Sickened: The Memoir of a Munchausen by Proxy Childhood


“Life is not a problem to be solved but a work to be made, and that work may well utilize much raw material we would prefer to do without.”
― quote from Sickened: The Memoir of a Munchausen by Proxy Childhood


“They say the truth hurts, but the only thing the truth hurts, are illusions.”
― quote from Sickened: The Memoir of a Munchausen by Proxy Childhood



“Books are my friends, where it’s okay to be silent, where you’re not a freak if you don’t want to get drunk, peel out in a parking lot, tip cows.”
― quote from Sickened: The Memoir of a Munchausen by Proxy Childhood


“Her voice trailed after any doctor who said no more tests could be done, stalked him down the corridor, sliced”
― quote from Sickened: The Memoir of a Munchausen by Proxy Childhood


“I am just a girl, a girl men touch without asking, a girl men disrobe without even seeing her tears.”
― quote from Sickened: The Memoir of a Munchausen by Proxy Childhood


Popular quotes

“You seem a lot like me," he said. "You don't gawk at me like I'm a freak."

"I'll kick anyone who does."

"I think you already did. Or at least smacked him with a tennis racket."

-Alexander and Raven, Vampire Kisses, Pg.127, The Beginning”
― Ellen Schreiber, quote from Vampire Kisses


“A—ris—ta?” Degan asked, sounding horse. “What is it?”
“A rat bit me,” she said, once again shocked by her own rasping voice.
“Jasper does that if—” Gaunt coughed and hacked. After a moment, he
spoke again. “If he thinks you’re dead or too weak to fight.”
“Jasper?”
“I call him that, but I’ve also named the stones in my cell.”
“I only counted mine,” Arista said.
“Two hundred and thirty-four,” Degan replied instantly.
“I have two hundred and twenty-eight.”
“Did you count the cracked ones as two?”
“No.”
― Michael J. Sullivan, quote from Heir of Novron


“To be called to a life of extraordinary quality, to live up to it, and yet to be unconscious of it is indeed a narrow way. To confess and testify to the truth as it is in Jesus, and at the same time to love the enemies of that truth, his enemies and ours, and to love them with the infinite love of Jesus Christ, is indeed a narrow way. To believe the promise of Jesus that his followers shall possess the earth, and at the same time to face our enemies unarmed and defenceless, preferring to incur injustice rather than to do wrong ourselves, is indeed a narrow way. To see the weakness and wrong in others, and at the same time refrain from judging them; to deliver the gospel message without casting pearls before swine, is indeed a narrow way. The way is unutterably hard, and at every moment we are in danger of straying from it. If we regard this way as one we follow in obedience to an external command, if we are afraid of ourselves all the time, it is indeed an impossible way. But if we behold Jesus Christ going on before step by step, we shall not go astray.”
― Dietrich Bonhoeffer, quote from The Cost of Discipleship


“Of course, the truth is that no one likes change. People in hell not only refuse to leave it, they invite you in, too. Even people who have blasted the other lives that touched their own blasted lives proudly declare in old age that they would not change a thing -- all that cursing and screaming was their life, by God, and it is not possible to imagine any other. Change introduces unpredictability, uncertainty, a universe of disorder. Right before an amoeba splits in two, it says to itself, uh uh, no way, I ain't gonna do that, nope.”
― Neil Gaiman, quote from Brief Lives


“Sometimes life has a cruel sense of humor, giving you the thing you always wanted at the worst time possible.”
― Lisa Kleypas, quote from Sugar Daddy


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