Quotes from Ellen Bass

It's impossible to feel good about yourself if you are doing things that you aren't proud of. . . . It's essential that you . . . [do] things you can respect and admire.

Then you hold life like a face between your palms, a plain face, no charming smile, no violet eyes, and you say, yes, I will take you I will love you, again.

Everyone has the right to tell the truth about her own life.

What would people look like if we could see them as they are, soaked in honey, stung and swollen, reckless, pinned against time?

Survivors are often good at both resolving and generating crisis. While this capacity to handle crisis can make you a good emergency room worker or ambulance driver, it can also be a way for you to keep yourself from feeling. If you are addicted to intensity and drama...you may be running from yourself.

One woman was sure that her father would appear on her front steps and try to kill her. In actuality, he hid from her after that, avoiding her totally. He was scared of her. You may not realize it, but you hold a lot of power when you tell the truth.

Eating The Bones by Ellen Bass The women in my family strip the succulent flesh from broiled chicken, scrape the drumstick clean; bite off the cartilage chew the gristle, crush the porous swellings at the ends of each slender baton. With strong molars they split the tibia, sucking out the dense marrow. They use up love, they swallow every dark grain, so at the end there's nothing left, a scant pile of splinters on the empty white plate.

A dread that something bad was waiting for me has followed me most of my life. I have a morbid fear of the dark. I will never close my eyes in the shower. There are parts of my own house I am just beginning to go into.

As survivors, we've been conditioned to be victims sexually. Many of us have never learned to say no or to set limits on our sexual activities...To heal, it's important that we take control, that we make active choices concerning if, when, and how we want to explore sexuality. Especially in the beginning, you need to put your own needs about sex ahead of anyone else's.

Healing from child sexual abuse takes commitment and dedication. But if you are willing to work hard, if you are determined to make lasting changes in your life, if you are able to find good resources and skilled support, you can not only heal but also thrive.

Give me peaches like burning clouds. I'll pare those globes until dawn. The syrup will linger on my fingers like your scent. Let me escape my own insistence.

the dolphins stitch sky to sea.

The past is so far away, but it flickers, then cleaves the night. The bones of the past splinter between our teeth. This is our life, love. Why did I think it would be anything less than too much of everything?

Use excessive work or

Our bodies are our essential connection to life.

So much inspires me. People living their lives with courage, beauty of all kinds, nature in all its aspects, people I love and people I hardly know, and, of course, other poets.

Poetry is the most intimate of all writing. I want to speak first from me to myself and then from me to you.

Visualizing how you want to be is [an] effective way to move toward your goal.