Andrea Gibson Quotes

month into the job, I can’t look at any of the girls without seeing my baby sister’s face the first time someone hurt her on purpose. It wasn’t my sister’s grief so much as her shock that stuck with me. None of these girls are shocked by the hurt that hunts them — they expect the blade of this life to keep cutting and ask it to whittle them into someone too sharp to touch.

Do you ever feel like the best of you is something you’re still hoping to grow into?

MY FIRST PSYCHOTHERAPIST TOLD ME TO SPEND THREE HOURS EACH DAY SITTING IN A DARK CLOSET WITH MY EYES CLOSED AND MY EARS PLUGGED. I TRIED IT ONCE BUT COULDN’T STOP THINKING HOW GAY IT WAS TO BE SITTING IN THE CLOSET.

who with a heart can stomach / how much they can stomach? / all your blood in the water / and i could still wade through, / and i will again and i will again / and i will again with everyone i lose. / what i want most is to live / the rest of my life desperately / wanting to live it.

I suppose I love this life,
In spite of my clenched first.

I’ve spent half of my life not knowing the difference between killing myself and fighting back. What if I don’t want healing
as much as I want justice? What if I don’t care if justice looks exactly like revenge? Do you think I don’t know that I can’t want revenge without strapping the bomb to my own chest? That’s how the dominoes of trauma fall. You become just another thing about to detonate.

There are few weapons more dangerous than our wounds, and, being wounded, there are things we all do that we would often rather die than face.

Do we really believe our need for Prozac
has nothing t do with Fallujah,
with Kabul, with the Mexican border,
with the thousands of U.S. school kids
bleeding budget cuts that will never heal
to fuel war tanks?

I know this / is our first date / and that’s a lot / to share over nachos, / but I’d ideally tell you everything about me, / preferably before dessert.

NOTHING HURTS MORE THAN LIVING SOMEONE ELSE’S LIFE.

To understand the universe, I turn to science but to understand my place in it, I turn to poetry.

that we are truly not alone in this, that our veins are absolutely strings tied to other people’s kites, that our lives are that connected. That my butterflies are never gone,

Many of these girls are not wanted by their families, and there are few things that make it harder to want to stay alive, she said,

You have to understand, when it hurt to love her, it hurt the way the light hurts your eyes in the middle of the night. But I had to see.

The last, and I mean the last time, I tried to return myself to sender was a year ago this June. After five months so sick I was certain my stomach would never know a butterfly again,