I have survived. I am here. Confused, screwed up, but here. So, how can I find my way? Is there a chain saw of the soul, an ax I can take to my memories or fears?
Interpretation
This quote reflects the struggle to cope with past experiences and seek a path forward despite confusion and pain.
In this quote, Laurie Halse Anderson expresses the chaotic emotions that accompany survival through difficult experiences. The speaker acknowledges their confusion and issues but also seeks a way to confront and cut through their painful memories and fears, suggesting a desire for healing and clarity in their journey of self-discovery.
In practice
In a motivational speech about overcoming challenges, I would use this quote to illustrate the struggle of finding strength in difficult times.
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.
This I choose to do. If there is a price, this I choose to pay. If it is my death, then I choose to die. Where this takes me, there I choose to go. I choose. This I choose to do.
Someone is always at my elbow reminding me that I am the granddaughter of slaves. It fails to register depression with me.
Christians know how to face difficulties, trials and defeat with serenity and hope in the Lord.
In the land of bleating sheep and braying jackasses, one brave and honest man is bound to create a scandal.
I'm not going to change the way I look or the way I feel to conform to anything. I've always been a freak. So I've been a freak all my life and I have to live with that, you know. I'm one of those people.
The Edge...There is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over. The others-the living-are those who pushed their control as far as they felt they could handle it, and then pulled back, or slowed down, or did whatever they had to when it came time to choose between Now and Later. But the edge is still Out there.
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