Quotes from Elisabeth Thomas

I don't know. I'm scared that out there, someday I'll look around and realize forty years have passed and no one can see me. That I'm gone.

I've spent my whole life reading beautiful books and watching beautiful movies, dreaming that there was some real place out there where I would fit and be beautiful, too.

But that wasn't right. Her life wasn't a story, and it didn't have to end this way. She was a girl. She was real. It was true.

On bad days, I could feel the whole year swinging underneath me like a dead thing.

I'm scared that out there, someday I'll look around and realize forty years have passed and no one can see me. That I'm gone.

I couldn't be here anymore. I couldn't be in me. But I couldn't be anywhere else, either. I had nowhere else to go.

And you have suffered through your own selves—your own critical eyes, your own standards, your own minds. Your spirits are beautiful, but they are not easy.

I wondered if I would remember this feeling after Catherine. The feeling of seeing a friend—someone I knew and who knew me, too, someone who cared about me—walking in through a door or waving from across a hall or bending to whisper in another friend's ear. Of being inside, so inside, such an intimacy, and at the same time seeing it from outside. A feeling of being seen, beautiful and young, seated at a mythic table.

read through your tutorial essay draft. Sixty pages describing an off-white canvas. Indecipherable." She shook her head. "It's as if you never learned the most basic analytical habits, so you never had to unlearn them.

I studied the photo of the boy, the one who had died six years ago, and wished I were dead. Dead people didn't have to do homework.

I wasn't afraid of the dark. I was afraid of the light—the future.

The Surrealism movement, our professor explained, was inspired by Freud's concept of the uncanny, the dreadful double. According to Freud, doubling creates meaning. Doubling turns sounds into words; a baby first speaks by turning ma into mama, pa into papa. But when a double appears uninvited—the buried object returns—it brings us into the realm of the uncanny. We watch dead things wake up. And we are afraid.

Futurist sculpture creates ideal new forms by using motion to break down the barrier between an object and its surroundings. To join the object's exterior plastic infinity to its interior plastic infinity.

I listened to her with my head in my arms and looked out the window at the whirling starry sky. The Greeks had used those same stars to conquer the world. We were like them - gods and heroes.