Dead girl walking” the boys say in the halls. “Tell us your secrets” the girls whisper, one toilet to another. "I am that girl. I am the spaces between my thighs, daylight shinning through. I am the bones they want, wired on a porcelain frame.
Interpretation
This quote reflects the struggle for identity and the objectification faced by individuals, particularly women, in society.
In this poignant quote, Laurie Halse Anderson explores the depths of self-identity amidst external perceptions and societal expectations. The phrase 'dead girl walking' symbolizes the feeling of being alive yet emotionally or spiritually absent, as others scrutinize and dissect one's existence based on superficial attributes. Through her powerful imagery, Anderson emphasizes the complex relationship between self-worth and societal judgment, showcasing how external voices can shape internal realities.
In practice
This quote could be used in a discussion about body image during a women's empowerment seminar.
Memory cuts both ways; it can either provide you with tremendous strength and a foundation to carry you through your life, or it can be a demon that just ruins your present and your future because you can’t let go of the past.
Here stands a girl clutching a knife. There is grease on the stove, blood in the air, and angry words piled in the corners. We are trained not to see it, not to see any of it. . . . Someone just ripped off my eyelids.
This girl shivers and crawls under the covers with all her clothes on and falls into an overdue library book, a faerie story with rats and marrow and burning curses. The sentences build a fence around her, a Times Roman 10-point barricade, to keep the thorny voices in her head from getting too close.
A breath of steam trickles out, filled with the sobs of a grown woman breaking into girl-sized pieces.
I open a paperclip and scratch it across the inside of my left wrist. Pitiful. If a suicide attempt is a cry for help, then what is this. A whimper, a peep? I draw little window cracks of blood, etching line after line until it stops hurting.
If I can write a book that will help the world make a little more sense to a teen, then that's why I was put on the planet.
That's my only defense against this world: to build a sentence out of it.
Your life is an expression of all your thoughts.
The perfect man uses his mind as a mirror. It grasps nothing. It regrets nothing. It receives but does not keep.
I find it wholesome to be alone the greater part of the time. To be in company, even with the best, is soon wearisome and dissipating. I love to be alone. I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.
Man has been here 32,000 years. That it took a hundred million years to prepare the world for him is proof that that is what it was done for. I suppose it is, I dunno. If The Eiffel Tower were now to represent the world's age, the skin of paint on the pinnacle knob at its summit would represent man's share of that age; and anybody would perceive that the skin was what the tower was built for. I reckon they would, I dunno.
I was seen in earlier years by family members and people of authority as somebody wasting his time. I had trouble with the restrictions of conformity. It made me edgy.
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