Quotes from Stephanie Hemphill

Learning to be a lady / is like learning / to live within a shell, / to be a crustacean encased / in a small white / uncomfortable world.

I fret for Sylvia. She appears anchored to the idea of sinking, which is silly when she so clearly soars above almost everyone.

I cannot be assured of exactly what I created be it madness and monster or beauty and light.

Perhaps it is easier For others To believe in you Than it is To believe In yourself.

The tides here are too rough. I sink here, happy only when I hoard my little blue sleeping pills, stash the blades of my razor. I accumulate a drawer of drop-out devices, so by December I can escape to a Merry Christmas.

We built a world of words and yet none satisfy now.

She said the night was March and black and that the hill where he kissed her and enveloped her in his arms was a sea of grass and she rooted to the ground like a sapling, like it was natural and yet all created for her moment of romance.

Why uproot a perfectly healthy white blazing star from the soil to allow room for a roadside weed?

If I were a man I might not wear the cloak of anonymity.

I understand now my final purpose-- through my words and deeds to inspire others to find hope and strength to speak and act. The girls who fear the fire inside themselves, I burned for them.

Inside a book, she captures all that's lost. She journals so her words won't fly away.

She breaks. She's sick. Throw a rope, a net. She falls like a shot-up plane. Help her find the landing strip, Her feet are wet— She'll learn, she'll train. She walks a rope on fire, "Look Ma, no hands.

It may be safe to walk, but where do you go when all directions wear the same black ashen despair?

I see my future now not as something intangible like a dream, but like a boat meeting land after time spent at sea, a destination I will reach.

The trees' bare bony fingers point crookedly towards Heaven or Hell or worse than that, towards nowhere.

All you know is you must change sail to catch it.

I want to stay young and pure and free, unstained by the sin of Eve.

Give me the strength to leaf, for I fear otherwise we may hang ourselves.

Give me the strength to lead, for I fear otherwise we may hang ourselves.