Quotes from Emma Forrest

It is madness. And if you don't know who you are, or if your real self has drifted away from you with the undertow, madness at least gives you an identity. It's the same with self-loathing. You're probably just normal and normal-looking but that's not a real identity, not the way ugliness is. Normality, just accepting that you're probably normal-looking, lacks the force field of self-disgust. If you don't know who you are, madness gives you something to believe in.

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.

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.

He was addicted to me and now he has gone cold turkey. He used to send me fifty texts a day. And now he is ignoring me. It's like I was once his Barack Obama. And now I am John McCain, conceding defeat like a sad-face sock puppet, knowing I have sold the best of myself. He, my electorate, not only does not want me, he actively feels pity.

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.

I think that's such a beautiful sentiment. Love should only last as long as a very expensive and impractical bikini that looks stunning, but dissolves in the sea within days. So many pop songs tell of this terrible, tiresome love that they want to last forever. But that just makes me think of long-life milk, acrid and fake. Love should be like a movie trailer. Even if the film's a stinker, you get the best laughs and the biggest explosions in the space of two minutes.

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

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.

It's only a heartache. It isn't a tragedy. A tragedy would be losing the father of my children to cancer. This I wrestle with the hardest. There are thirty-one flavors of pain, like Baskin Robbins in hell. Am I allowed to feel pain at a breakup? When there is so much other shit going on in this world? Love is extremely serious. I don't think this is trivial.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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