I've dealt with depression my entire life, on and off, which makes me the perfect author for teenage readers.
Interpretation
The author shares a personal struggle with depression, suggesting that this experience qualifies her to write for teens.
Laurie Halse Anderson expresses that her lifelong battle with depression gives her a unique perspective and understanding that resonates with teenage readers. This personal experience enables her to write authentically about the struggles that many young people face, making her work more relatable and impactful.
In practice
In a school assembly discussing mental health awareness, this quote can illustrate the connection between personal experience and creative expression.
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 canβt 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.
Kind words produce their own image in men's souls; and a beautiful image it is. They soothe and quiet and comfort the hearer. They shame him out of his sour, morose, unkind feelings. We have not yet begun to use kind words in such abundance as they ought to be used.
It is not my prayer and humility that you cause things to go as you wish, but by acquiring a knowledge of natural laws.
The only true voyage, the only bath in the Fountain of Youth, would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes, to see the universe through the eyes of another, of a hundred others, to see the hundred universes that each of them sees, that each of them is; and this we do [with great artists]; with artists like these we do really fly from star to star.
All day long and all night through, One thing only must I do: Quench my pride and cool my blood, Lest I perish in the flood.
Reflection is a flower of the mind, giving out wholesome fragrance; but revelry is the same flower, when rank and running to seed.
Everything that you do under compulsion goes to build up attachment.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.