Laurie Halse Anderson Quotes

[I] don't think I was trying to kill myself. I just wanted to hurt, and understand exactly whay I was hurting. This made sense: you cut, you felt pain, period.

Delia's arms were inscribed with a grid of self- inflicted wounds, an intricate text of self-loathing

There were times I felt so anxious, almost like I was crawling out of my skin, that if I didn't do something physical to match the way I felt inside, I would explode. I cut myself to take my mind off that. I just didn't care what happened. I had no fear.

I am a cutter, you see. Also a snipper, a slicer, a carver, a jabber. I am a very special case. I have a purpose. My skin, you see, screams. It's covered with words - cook, cupcake, kitty, curls - as if a knife-wielding first-grader learned to write on my flesh. I sometimes, but only sometimes, laugh. Getting out of the bath and seeing, out of the corner of my eye, down the side of a leg: baby-doll. Pulling on a sweater, and in a flash of my wrist: harmful. Why these words?

Blood transforms the warm bath water and, in it, I see weakly that this was a mistake. The razor's cut is not deep, nevertheless the blood rushes out happily in the warm water as if kin to it, the same tender substance. Rising a new person transformed with an icy sense of error I go to the sink and turn on cold water which is not friendly to blood. The cut is deeper than imagined.

Most self-laceration is more noisy than painful.

Some people go shopping - I cut myself.

Sometimes I even cut myself to see how much it bleeds It's like adrenaline, the pain is such a sudden rush for me.

For a long time, I didn't want to live.

For those who need a name, there's a gift basket of medical terms. All I know is cutting made me feel safe. It was proof. Thoughts and words, captured where I could see them and track them. The truth, stinging, on my skin, in a freakish shorthand. Tell me you're going to the doctor, and I'll want to cut worrisome on my arm. Say you've fallen in love and I buzz the outlines of tragic over my breast. I hadn't necessarily wanted to be cured.

My death from the wrists, two name tags, blood worn like a corsage to bloom one on the left and one on the right.

We couldn't imagine the emptiness of a creature who put a razor to her wrists and opened her veins, the emptiness and the calm.

How many people have wanted to kill themselves, and have been content with tearing up their photograph!

So, what, you got cigarette burns, too?" Gitanes said. Chip showed his palm, "It's nothing." "Self-inflicted. You pathetic American." "Different kind of prison" Chip said.

That was when I cut my arms with a razor blade as a means of creative expression. I only did it lightly, just grazing the skin, to see the way the blood would bleed out, to make myself look tougher. Not like some of those kids who keep going deeper and deeper, wondering what they look like down to the bone, because it's a world that's so close and yet so far and so dangerous and so much their own. The only world that is their own.

I know from my own experience that suicide is not what it seems. Too easy to try to piece together the fragmented life. The spirit torn in bits so that the body follows.

Yes I try to kill myself in small amounts, an innocuous occupation. Actually I'm hung up on it.

Suicide - when I think of it, to me it means someone had a lot of problems and they couldn't fight through them anymore. That's not cowardly. It's sad and nothing but.

I know what it's like to want to die. How it hurts to smile. How you try to fit in but you can't. You hurt yourself on the outside to try to kill the thing on the inside.

And I ask him why he cuts his arms with a razor. "Just fo feel. Just to feel something.

I can't stop thinking about cutting myself up. Visual bruises can be covered with make-up, but down to the core, I'm all bruises.

I have a suicide impulse.

There have been times when I have deliberately tried to take my life... I think I must have been crying for some attention.

I always wished I had died, and I still wish that, because I could have gotten the whole thing over with.

I hit my head against the wall because I don't want to know all the terrible things that I know about. I don't want to feel all these wretched things, but they're in me already. If I don't get rid of them, I'm not ever going to feel anything else.