#witch quote

“I think it’s brave. I think it’s brave that you get up in the morning when your heart aches and life is messy and you do not feel like being soft for the world. I think it is brave that you continue to love and express and open your soul, despite the way you were treated in the past. I think it is brave that you keep going, that you keep believing in something more, something bigger, even when you may not know what you are hoping for. I think it is brave that you fight, I think it is brave that you choose, every single day, to move forward - because that is what makes you strong. That is what makes you strong.”

─ Bianca Sparacino

“Dear Emotional Creature,

You know who you are. I wrote this book because I believe in you. I believe in your authenticity, your uniqueness, your intensity, your wildness. I love the way you dye your hair purple, or hike up your short skirt, or blare your music while you lip-sync every single memorized lyric. I love your restlessness and your hunger. You are one of our greatest natural resources. You possess a necessary agency and energy that if unleashed could transform, inspire, and heal the world. 

I know we make you feel stupid, as if being a teenager meant you were temporarily deranged. We have become accustomed to muting you, judging you, discounting you, asking you - sometimes even forcing you - to betray what you see and know and feel. 

You scare us. You remind us of what we have been forced to shut down or abandon in ourselves in order to fit in. You ask us by your being to question, to wake up, to reperceive. Sometimes I think we tell you we are protecting you when really we are protecting ourselves from our own feelings of self-betrayal and loss.”

─ I am an Emotional Creature, Eve Ensler 

and perhaps
what made her beautiful
was not her appearance
or what she achieved,
but in her love
and in her courage,
and her audacity
to believe:
no matter 
the darkness
around her,
Light ran wild
within her,
and that was the way 
she came alive,
and it showed up
in everything. 

“If I am a witch, then so be it, I said. And I took to eating black things - coffee, dark chiles, the bruised part of fruit, the darkest, blackest things to make me hard and strong.” 

─ Sandra Cisneros

“And kid, you’ve got to love yourself. You’ve got to wake up at four in the morning, brew black coffee, and stare at the birds drowning in the darkness of the dawn. You’ve got to sit next to the man at the train station who’s reading your favorite book and start a conversation. You’ve got to come home after a bad day and burn your skin from a shower. Then you’ve got to wash all your sheets until they smell of lemon detergent you bought for four dollars at the local grocery store. You’ve got to stop taking everything so goddam personally. You are not the moon kissing the black sky. You’ve got to compliment someone’s crooked brows at an art fair and tell them that their eyes remind you of green swimming pools in mid July. You’ve got to stop letting yourself get upset about things that won’t matter in two years. Sleep in on Saturday morning and wake yourself up early on Sunday. You’ve got to stop worrying about what you’re going to tell her when she finds out. You’ve got to stop over thinking why she stopped caring about you over six months ago. You’ve got to stop asking everyone for their opinions. Fuck it. Love yourself, kiddo. You’ve got to love yourself.” 

“Maybe it’s okay that you haven’t worked out every little detail just yet. Maybe it’s okay that you are feeling a little lost lately. Maybe you don’t need all the answers right now, maybe everything you need now, is right here. Maybe the only thing you’re missing is trust – believing that everything will work out the way it’s supposed to. Once you just let go of your fears and put your trust into yourself and into the universe, that’s when it all comes together. Maybe this is your sign to do it, whatever thing you’re thinking of when reading this. This is your sign to trust yourself. This is your sign it’s time to change.”

─ Charlotte Freeman

SALT

Were things good then?
Yes. They were good.
Did you know they were good?
At the time? Your time?

No, because I was worrying
or maybe hungry
or asleep, half of those hours.
Once in a while there was a pear or a plum
or a cup with something in it,
or a white curtain, rippling,
or else a hand.
Also the mellow lamplight
in that antique tent,
falling on beauty, fullness,
bodies entwined and cherishing,
then flareup, and then gone.

Mirages, you decide:
everything was never.
Though over your shoulder there it is,
your time laid out like a picnic
in the sun, still glowing,
although it’s night.

Don’t look behind, they say:
You’ll turn to salt.
Why not, though? Why not look?
Isn’t it glittery?
Isn’t it pretty, back there?

─ Margaret Atwood, Dearly

─ Painting by Frida Kahlo

“Yes, Mother,” I said. “Promise me you will never disappear from me again. Show me how I can always know you’re here. Show me how to share my joy with you, that you will be happy to receive it.”

“Oh, my daughter,” I said. “You will forget that I am here. This is the way of human beings, to forget. But you found your way back to me once and so can find your way back again, because I am always here. The world will hurt you again and again. You will hurt yourself again and again. And when it does, and when you do, you will remember me again and again. You will drop to your knees. You will hold yourself. You will be your own daughter again.” 

─ Melissa Broder, Milk Fed

“Why not? Why not be as ambitious as you want to be? Why not be pretentious? What is pretentions but to have the pretence to the assumption that you belong here. Be prepared to be inconceivable and then be prepared to innovate beyond that because we need you and we are ready for you.”

─ Ocean Vuong

Twenty-three

One day you wake up and you’re twenty-three and you can’t remember what it feels like to be seventeen but you still cry to your mother after a bad day and you look a little older but you don’t really feel it. One day you’re twenty-three and your great-aunt is telling you how mature you look and how you grew a little taller but inside you still remember sitting under the oak tree reading with no meetings tomorrow and no rent to pay and the only thing you can think about is how at seventeen you thought at twenty-three you would know everything and now you can’t remember how you got from there to here. But seventeen-year-old you was wrong because you know only some things and not everything.

You know that coffee tastes better in the mornings and your home isn’t your home anymore; it’s “Mum and Dad’s”. You know your car needs servicing every six months and groceries are harder to do after breakups. She liked cookie dough and walnuts and strawberry-flavored milk and now every time you go to the store you can’t buy spaghetti without remembering it was a Friday night and she kissed you for the first time and the heat from her skin could have set your entire place on fire. One day you’re twenty-three and you’re trying to explain to a seventeen-year-old all the mistakes you made so they won’t make them too, when all you really want is for someone to realize you still don’t have the first clue.

─ Courtney Peppernell, Pillow Thoughts

You are not required to be small.
You are not required to be pleasant.
You are not required to be conventional.
You are not required to be accommodating.
You are not required to be submissive.
You are not required to be merciful. 
You are not required to be quiet.

─ Trista Mateer

Her Time

“She has been feeling it for awhile now - that sense of awakening. There is a gentle rage simmering inside her, and it is getting stronger by the day. She will hold it close to her - she will nurture it and let it grow. She won’t let anyone take it away from her. It is her rocket fuel and finally, she is going places. She can feel it down to her very core - this is her time. She will not only climb mountains - she will move them too.”

─ Lang Leav