Amy Reed Quotes

Do you remember? Do you remember the world before the poison?

~ Amy Reed

I’m feeling really hopeful about it, like maybe I actually have a chance to get better. To be happy. It’s funny, I just realized that my whole life, the whole time I’ve been trying to be perfect, I never once considered happiness as part of the equation. I guess it seemed so impossible I couldn’t even let myself fantasize about it. But now, I don’t know, things feel different somehow. Like impossible things might not be so impossible.

~ Amy Reed

There is a picture of me in their heads, a picture of someone I don't know yet. She is not the chubby girl with the braces and bad perm. She is not the girl hiding in the bathroom at recess. She is someone new, a blank slate they have named beautiful. That is what I am now: beautiful, with this new body and face and hair and clothes. Beautiful, with this erasing of history.

~ Amy Reed

I wonder if anybody else feels this way, if anyone in here is as scared as I am. Are they as sad and angry and confused and ashamed? Is that even possible? Is it even possible for one building to hold all that pain?

~ Amy Reed

This is the kind of thing that makes sense to them, this is a language they know. They know what to do with`disease'. They know how to attach a doctor's medical descriptions to hope.

~ Amy Reed

Phones are only good for ordering pizza and telling someone you're running late

~ Amy Reed

Do you remember? Do you remember the world before the dark? Do you remember the world with mothers and fathers and stillness that did not feel like death?

~ Amy Reed

What if I'm so broken I can never do something as basic as feed myself? Do you realize how twisted that is? It amazes me sometimes that humans still exist. We're just animals, after all. And how can an animal get so removed from nature that it loses the instinct to keep itself alive?

~ Amy Reed

I'd love to wrap myself inside your sadness and pretend it is mine

~ Amy Reed

You act like you're invincible, but I know deep down you want someone to hold your hand and buy you flowers and look you in the eye and tell you you're his soul mate. You want someone who will love every piece of you, even the pieces you can't love yourself.

~ Amy Reed

What if I can't ever be who you want me to be? What if I keep letting you down?

~ Amy Reed

All I know is I want you to be happy, and if I could do anything to give that to you, I would.

~ Amy Reed

I don't know if anyone can ever really explain why they believe in someone. But I do. I believe in you. I hope that's worth something.

~ Amy Reed

They said the doctors could tell from the scars.Stop.Scars can tell you how old the wound is.Stop.When I stopped going to school, they came and found me. They found me in the closet.Sarah.

~ Amy Reed

There is a whole other world with an entirely different version of me, a me that is not pretty, a me that no boys want, a me she would never talk to.

~ Amy Reed

Shirley: Christopher, would you like to tell Olivia what F.I.N.E means?Christopher: Fucked-up, Insecure, Neurotic, and Emotional...Olivia: But what if you really do feel fine?Shirley: Christopher, care to answer that?Christopher: Um, there's no such feeling as fine.

~ Amy Reed

Your boyfriend smells bad, says Sarah as she sniffs the armpit of the giant sweatshirt.All boys smell bad I say and she nods her head like we have just figured out something very important.

~ Amy Reed

Imagine trying to live without air.Now imagine something worse.

~ Amy Reed

I think before I ever became an alcoholic, before I even tasted alcohol or tried drugs, I was already programmed to be this way. Before there was cocaine or vodka or sex or any of that, there was fantasy. There was escape. That was my first addiction. I remember being a little kid and imagining everything different, myself different. How did I get the idea in my head at age eight that everything was better somewhere else? Why would a child have a hole inside that can’t get full no matter what she does? The real world could never make me happy, so I retreated to the world inside my head. And as I grew, as the real world proved itself more and more painful, the fantasy world expanded.

~ Amy Reed

I don’t feel great, but I also don’t feel terrible, either, and I guess that’s how normal people feel most of the time. They live in the space between black and white, and their ups and downs are various shades of gray, not the extreme highs and lows I’ve always thought of as normal. I think that’s one of the major differences between us and them, between addicts and Normies. Somewhere along the line we got stuck on this roller coaster that only knows how to go to the highest up and the lowest low. We get high so we can feel invincible and perfect, but the feeling never lasts. Gravity always wins, and we fall fast, to a place lower and darker than many people will probably ever know. And the crazy thing is that this is just normal for us. We cycle through these extremes all the time, and it’s become as natural as breathing. Exhausting, but natural.

~ Amy Reed

The first week is the hardest. Then little by little the world opens up, and you realize there are all these people around you with their own needs that have nothing to do with you. Then you forget, and everything’s about you again. And maybe that cycle continues for the rest of your life. Maybe the world keeps expanding and contracting. Maybe you know you’re well when it finally stays the same size.

~ Amy Reed

Getting rid of the drugs doesn’t get rid of all the other ways you learned to deal with the world. It’s not that easy.

~ Amy Reed

...and I know -I just know- you can remind me what it feels like to have someone look at me and love me with wanting me to be something else.

~ Amy Reed

This thing that’s always been inside and hidden deep is getting bigger and stronger and threatening to show itself, and I want to stop it but I also don’t, and I don’t know if I’m ready, but I think maybe I want what’s inside turned outside, maybe I want everything out in the open, all my secrets laid out for everyone to see. I wonder what that would look like. I wonder what kind of mess it would make. I wonder if you can ever really be ready for the part of you that you’ve been hiding your whole life to finally come out.

~ Amy Reed

How can she stand up there so tall as she’s telling us how her mother beat her and her father molested her when she was a little girl? How is it possible for her to look so proud? How is she not being consumed by shame? She should be disintegrating before our eyes. She should be struck by lightning, and God’s big, angry, booming voice should be shaking the room with “How dare you? I told you never to tell.” But that’s not her God, she says. Her God is loving and kind and wants what’s best for her. Her God loves peace and serenity and forgiveness. Her God doesn’t make her keep secrets. I thought I knew God all my life, but maybe it was some other guy the whole time. I want this God. I want Val’s God. I want a God who doesn’t make me jump through hoops and hate myself to earn his love.

~ Amy Reed

That's what dreams are really like, you know? They're not full of melting clocks or floating roses or people made out of rocks. Most of the time, dreams look just like the normal world. It's your feelings that tell you something's off. Not your mind, not your intellect, not something as obvious as that. The only part of you that really knows what's going on is the part of you that's most a mystery. If that's not Surrealism, I don't know what is.

~ Amy Reed

Everyone's always making fun of him and calling him crazy behind his back, but I can kind of understand how someone would end up that way. I mean, if no one ever pays attention to you telling the truth, then it probably makes sense to try lying for a change.

~ Amy Reed