Jillian Lauren

“I pretend I'm fighting to live in the present but really I'm having an affair with the past every secret moment.”

“Regret perches like an umbrella over all of my days.”

“I'm too proud to admit that I was forgotten, even to the guy who did the forgetting.”

“And even if it wasn't Madison, it had been hundreds of others and probably hundreds more. That's what happens to your eyes when you spend your nights in the laps of everyone else's husbands.”

“Dancing was another one of those choice I made that I didn't know until way later what it really meant.”

“You have to be careful how you fake it, though, because things like that can stick and before you know it you become what you're pretending to be..”

“We all like to believe that we'd be brave. We'd be the hero in the movie, the one who sacrifices himself to save others, the one who does the right thing when the world around him is wrong. In the movie the right choice is clear. And we leave the theater feeling good about ourselves because we can say, Me, I'd do the right thing. No one says, Me, I'd be the coward. Me, I'd rat out my neighbor to save myself. But that's what people do, mostly”

“I know something about performing. I know that when it seems like the avalanche is about to roll over you, you face into it and keep both arms swimming as hard as you can. You smile and you sell it.”

“I've always liked rooms where the party hasn't started yet...I love the feeling that anything could happen. After the party, when anything already has happened, there's usually the inevitable fact to face that anything wasn't all you'd hoped it to be.”

“Before that experience, I had often felt the kind of alone that comes from the suspicion that you are not only genetically different from those around you, but different in your very soul...[then] I was a different kind of alone. I was alone and ashamed of myself...it was no one's fault but mine.”

“Like people touch the feet of Jesus on the Pieta and hope for a blessing, I would touch the feet of the dancer and hope for grace.”

“Some days seem like the end of your life but then they aren't and you still have to figure out how to wake up again.”

“I look for a sign. Where to go next. you never know when you'll get one. Even the most faithless among us are waiting to be proven wrong.”

“The air hangs thick with awkward static, like it usually does around the endless parade of therapists, social workers, and grief counselors. Does anyone feel comfortable in these tableaux of forced intimacy where you're meant to shine a light in your darkest corners for someone who is supposed to be nonjudgmental? As if there is such an animal”

“Life is a constant series of cleaning up the last mess.”

“Fall and I'll catch you. And that was all I'd ever wanted- someone to catch me.”

“I was sure that if I could just scale this fortress I would reach a height with a sunny blue sky and fresh air. I would stand there and experience myself as redeemable rather than ruined. I had no idea what kind of animal I was facing.If you had suggested to me at the time that my problems were due to some faulty wiring, some chemistry experiment gone wrong in my brain, I'd have said you were suggesting that I not take responsibility for my own choices. Now I know I was wrong. Now when I'm haunted by the specter of depression, I recognize it for what it is. I don't systematically dismantle my life every time depression pops out from behind a tree. But at that time, I was sure it was fixable if the world would just change faster, or if I would.”

“The hitting was easy compared to the words. The hitting happened only infrequently but the words happened every day. I knew he was wrong, knew he was inexcusable. But still, the words were the worst part.”

“Girls at war opt for a quieter cruelty than fistfights and drive-by shootings. Girls circumvent the corporeal and go straight for each other's souls. The bleeding is harder to stanch.”

“She was like a real strawberry in a roomful of strawberry Pop-Tarts.”