Quotes from Rachel Klein

You don't know where you are or where your dreams end and the world begins.

Girls are always saying things like, "I'm so unhappy that I'm going to overdose on aspirin," but they'd be awfully surprised if they succeeded. They have no intention of dying. At the first sight of blood, they panic.

She goes where she pleases. She appears unhoped for, uncalled for. She moves through doors and walls and windows. Her thoughts move through minds. She enters dreams. She vanishes and is still there. She knows the future and sees through flesh. She is not afraid of anything.

How do we know that our life really happened and that we are not simply accumulating details, making it all up as we go along?

I love that moment, when you stop struggling to stay awake and your eyelids shut sink down and you slip effortlessly into another realm that's beckoning to you.

I laughed when I read about being born with two hearts, one of which is devoted only to destroying humanity.

the truth is what you can't see but are certain of anyway.

Why should I be sad? Everyone has to die. If you have a body, it's too late to cry. It's only funerals I can't stand.

You have to trust someone before you can have rituals with them.

If I know something, I am not a victim. Victims don't know the meaning of their suffering. I am an enemy or a collaborator, not a victim.

I have always been intrigued by the journals that girls keep. They are like dollhouses. Once you look inside them, the rest of the world seems very far away, even unbelievable.

Some days I wonder how I'll get through a whole lifetime of thinking. A life that's just words, words, words, shuffling around in my head. Was I born that way?

To sublime: to pass directly from the solid to the vapor state. To sublimate: to divert the expression of an instinctual desire or impulse from its primitive form to one that is considered more socially or culturally acceptable. Sublime: of outstanding spiritual, intellectual, or moral worth.

Nothing existed outside ourselves and school. For us, the world of politics, social revolution, the war in Vietnam never happened.

I can't imagine what it would be like to have sex with a man. To be so intimate with another person. Not to hide anything. I don't know if I could do that. It would have to be a boy anyway, not a grown man, someone as scared as me.

Hey, Ernessa, where the fuck are you?

The future when everybody changes and turns into someone different. I'll become a person I won't like at all. It won't matter because that person will have forgotten all about me. I won't exist anymore. It's worse than dying- It means my life now is not really happening.

Some days I wonder how I'll get through a whole lifetime of thinking. A life that's just words, Words, words, shuffling around in my head.

I spent most of this weekend sitting on the sofa reading Proust. The only time my mother left her studio, which she locked behind her, was to go to Thanksgiving dinner at my aunt's house.

Voor iedereen die zich afvraagt of het mogelijk is de puberteit te overleven, is een bevestigend antwoord de enige geruststelling die ik kan geven.

Childhood - even a sad childhood - eventually becomes a place we think we've dreamed or stumbled across and want to find again but never can.