“I can physically see the effort it takes for him to open his mouth and force out the words. He's spent so much of his life not being seen, not being heard, that he's forgotten how to realize anything he says does hold weight and is important.”
― Kelley York, quote from Suicide Watch
“The idea of not being a kid anymore terrifies me. I am an adult and I have been hurled out of the world of boys and girls into the fray of men and women, and expected to function as a grown-up when I never functioned very well as a kid.”
― Kelley York, quote from Suicide Watch
“It doesn't matter if it could be worse, because even those people living on the street could still say 'it's not as bad as it could be.' You still feel the pain. It still matters. All this means nothing unless you have people around who understand you. People who get that, sometimes, you're just...really, really fucking sad and it's for no reason at all. Then you get pissed off 'cause you realize you're upset without a good reason, and you feel even worse.”
― Kelley York, quote from Suicide Watch
“Once upon a time, I lost everything and I was so alone. The sadness, the hurt, it all seemed so infinite. When you're wandering alone in a storm, you can't see the end, or if there even is one, and how close it might be.
I'm still wandering, but maybe I don't feel so lost now.
I'll keep trying. I promise.”
― Kelley York, quote from Suicide Watch
“The ledge isn't even wide enough for my feet to fit on completely. I hang onto the rail tightly and do a Casper does...leaning out slowly over the water. Like this, there is no safety. No rail to catch me if I slip. I'm almost flying. Between me and death, there is...nothing. Nothing in the way but my own decision to hang on.”
― Kelley York, quote from Suicide Watch
“Just because someone doesn't act or look unhappy doesn't mean their lives are perfect." He raises his eyebrows. "There's this method of dealing with things that involves keeping your chin up. Knowing whatever crap you're dealing with right now isn't going to last forever. All things pass.”
― Kelley York, quote from Suicide Watch
“Except then I wonder what it's like to feel normal because if you take away the things I've felt all my life--the insecurity, the pain, the loneliness, the absolute dissolution of any sane or rational thought during one of my more manic moods and the helplessness when I realize one of said manic moods is creeping up on me (like right now)--what's left after the fact? Emptiness?”
― Kelley York, quote from Suicide Watch
“Of course you are. Emotions are totally irrational half the time." Her ice blue eyes lock onto me. "But you have full control over how you deal with them. Acknowledging that something is irrational and refraining from taking it out on someone is the best thing to do.”
― Kelley York, quote from Suicide Watch
“I take medication that makes me feel absolutely nothing. Medication that scoops out my insides and leaves me hollow. Sometimes I take it because that emptiness is the only way to keep my heart from crumbling to pieces.”
― Kelley York, quote from Suicide Watch
“Breathe in, breathe out. Over and over again.
Just to prove a broken heart can't really kill you.”
― Kelley York, quote from Suicide Watch
“That was offensive on so many levels. You can't just tell someone they look like a Jew.”
― Kelley York, quote from Suicide Watch
“In this part of California, there is no fall or spring. Summer drops right into winter, into summer, back and forth. Our idea of autumn is October, where the leaves rapidly go from green to gold to on-the-ground, and it's suddenly freezing.”
― Kelley York, quote from Suicide Watch
“Finding something for a zombie costume in a wardrobe befitting Rainbow Brite isn't easy.”
― Kelley York, quote from Suicide Watch
Kelley York
Born place: in Sacramento, The United States
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“Life is not a PG feel-good movie. Real life often ends badly. Literature tries to document this reality, while showing us it is still possible for us to endure nobly.”
― Matthew Quick, quote from The Silver Linings Playbook
“Scar tissue had formed a knot on the bottom of his foot. He inspected the writing frequently—PROPERTY OF THE ALACRÁN ESTATE—but the scar had sliced through the tiny lettering. It was more difficult to make out the words.”
― Nancy Farmer, quote from The House of the Scorpion
“course. For in some blind, dualistic way both she and Asa insisted, as do all religionists, in disassociating God from harm and error and misery, while granting Him nevertheless supreme control. They would seek for something else—some malign, treacherous, deceiving power which, in the face of God’s omniscience and omnipotence, still beguiles and betrays—and find it eventually in the error and perverseness of the human heart, which God has made, yet which He does not control, because He does not want to control it.”
― Theodore Dreiser, quote from An American Tragedy
“I remember going to the British Museum one day to read up the treatment for some slight ailment of which I had a touch – hay fever, I fancy it was. I got down the book, and read all I came to read; and then, in an unthinking moment, I idly turned the leaves, and began to indolently study diseases, generally. I forget which was the first distemper I plunged into – some fearful, devastating scourge, I know – and, before I had glanced half down the list of “premonitory symptoms,” it was borne in upon me that I had fairly got it.
I sat for awhile, frozen with horror; and then, in the listlessness of despair, I again turned over the pages. I came to typhoid fever – read the symptoms – discovered that I had typhoid fever, must have had it for months without knowing it – wondered what else I had got; turned up St. Vitus’s Dance – found, as I expected, that I had that too, – began to get interested in my case, and determined to sift it to the bottom, and so started alphabetically – read up ague, and learnt that I was sickening for it, and that the acute stage would commence in about another fortnight. Bright’s disease, I was relieved to find, I had only in a modified form, and, so far as that was concerned, I might live for years. Cholera I had, with severe complications; and diphtheria I seemed to have been born with. I plodded conscientiously through the twenty-six letters, and the only malady I could conclude I had not got was housemaid’s knee.
...
I had walked into that reading-room a happy, healthy man. I crawled out a decrepit wreck.
I went to my medical man. He is an old chum of mine, and feels my pulse, and looks at my tongue, and talks about the weather, all for nothing, when I fancy I’m ill; so I thought I would do him a good turn by going to him now. “What a doctor wants,” I said, “is practice. He shall have me. He will get more practice out of me than out of seventeen hundred of your ordinary, commonplace patients, with only one or two diseases each.” So I went straight up and saw him, and he said:
“Well, what’s the matter with you?”
I said:
“I will not take up your time, dear boy, with telling you what is the matter with me. Life is brief, and you might pass away before I had finished. But I will tell you what is NOT the matter with me. I have not got housemaid’s knee. Why I have not got housemaid’s knee, I cannot tell you; but the fact remains that I have not got it. Everything else, however, I HAVE got.”
And I told him how I came to discover it all.
Then he opened me and looked down me, and clutched hold of my wrist, and then he hit me over the chest when I wasn’t expecting it – a cowardly thing to do, I call it – and immediately afterwards butted me with the side of his head. After that, he sat down and wrote out a prescription, and folded it up and gave it me, and I put it in my pocket and went out.
I did not open it. I took it to the nearest chemist’s, and handed it in. The man read it, and then handed it back.
He said he didn’t keep it.
I said:
“You are a chemist?”
He said:
“I am a chemist. If I was a co-operative stores and family hotel combined, I might be able to oblige you. Being only a chemist hampers me.”
I read the prescription. It ran:
“1 lb. beefsteak, with
1 pt. bitter beer
every 6 hours.
1 ten-mile walk every morning.
1 bed at 11 sharp every night.
And don’t stuff up your head with things you don’t understand.”
I followed the directions, with the happy result – speaking for myself – that my life was preserved, and is still going on.”
― Jerome K. Jerome, quote from Three Men in a Boat
“We must not see any person as an abstraction. Instead, we must see in every person a universe with its own secrets, with its own treasures, with its own sources of anguish, and with some measure of triumph. —ELIE WIESEL from The Nazi Doctors and the Nuremberg Code”
― Rebecca Skloot, quote from The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
Hardwired
Light Years
Love Always, Kate
The Never List
One Evening in Paris
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