Quotes from Shelley Jackson

Scar tissue does more than flaunt its strength by chronicling the assaults it has withstood. Scar tissue is new growth. And it is tougher than skin innocent of the blade.

I patch together a living language out of reanimated parts, like Frankenstein, and feel no disgust at scrabbling in the charnel house. Each of us makes her own monster, who earns a cozy co-tenancy of our tomb. We're all the last native speakers of a language that dies with us. Am I so special for tasting the rot on my tongue? For knowing whose remains I'm kitted out in?

I began to invent something new: a way to hang together without pretending I was whole

Feathers needed, swan preferred.

It is a terrible thing when it is the substitute that is sent to find a new life, a sign that a person yearns for change but cannot imagine creating it herself.... If scapegoats feel pain, it is only the delegated pain of their originals.

Not that pain is the worst thing in the universe. Interesting things happen when you adapt pain for your own. This thing you were prepared to spend your life flinching from is suddenly just another piece of information.

Still, I know how to use the little I have, my flat stomach and rather flatter chest, my slightly bowed, but strong and flexible legs. I produce plenty of phlegm. I have clever hands and a stare that could take the silvering off a mirror. Men flatter themselves they are original in admiring me. How confused they are when they find out they have competition. (There is no desperation like that of a lover who has decided to do you a favor, and finds himself waiting in line.)

Cut nerves left lying on the threshing floors drift and roll and wind up all aligned with the earth's magnetic field, like iron filings swayed by a magnet in a classroom experiment.

Language is a terrible, cold thing, I think. One may recount an event, calmly selecting the most suitable words, that to remember without benefit of ink is almost beyond bearing. We accept the counterfeit and are thankful, for it spares us the awful weight of our lives.