Quotes from Erika Krouse

When I asked my shrink if I was a control freak, he finished saying "Absolutely" before I finished saying "freak." I told him that I once worked with a woman who carried a remote control in her purse. Whenever she got worried or angry, she took it out and stroked it like a gerbil. My shrink said that if I keep comparing myself to severe neurotics, I'll think that anything is permissible.

Maybe I, too, was splashing around in other people's pain just to avoid drowning in my own. Maybe I was only trying to help them because nobody helped me.

People always rely on the incompetent idiot defense—it doesn't hurt them. Look at Iran-Contra. They named an airport after that guy.

If I didn't tell someone everything, maybe I didn't exist.

It was what Raymond Chandler would have called "a nice neighborhood to have bad habits in.

It was like opening a sealed jar with a tight lid. You have to apply heat, push your breasts aside, and lean your weight into it, wondering the whole time if it's stuck for good, until suddenly there's movement, the suction releases, and the lid comes off in your hand.

Trauma breaks your brain—makes it atrophy forever. The damage is not metaphorical but physical. The most severely affected tissue is the left superior parietal lobule, associated with memory, language, and the ability to orient oneself in the world. The lobule shrinks.

But no jagged simile, no disjointed paragraph can come close to describing real pain. Pain is its own language. Each description feels false, decorative, like I'm pouring watercolors into the crater of a bomb site (see, I'm failing even now).

Nothing's more comforting than the sound of rain when you're not in it." (Tell Me Everything pg. 192)