Quotes From "Girl Trade" By Chloe Thurlow

When you remove love from sex you enter a mansion with many rooms shaded in nuance and excess, an invitation to peel away all conventions and programming. A chance to explore your hidden self. You shed something and clothe yourself in something else. Sex is the greatest of gifts. Orgasm a glimpse of perfection. Chloe Thurlow

We make our own destiny, not because we can see the road ahead, but because we cannot see the road ahead. It is the road, the motion, the forward movement, that takes us to ourselves. Chloe Thurlow

Our brain is a circuit board with neurons and terminals ready to be wired. We are born free, then programmed to obey our parents, to tell the truth, pass exams, pursue and achieve, love and propagate, age and fade unfulfilled and uncertain what it has all been for. We swallow the operating system with our mother's milk and sleepwalk into the forest of consumer illusion craving shoes, houses, cars, magazines, experiences that endorse our preconceived dreams and opinions. We grow into our parents. We becomes clones, robots, matchstick men thinking and saying the same, feeling the same, behaving the same, appreciating in books and films and art shows those things we already recognize and understand. Chloe Thurlow

If character is destiny, I was fated to be carried off into the desert. From the deck of the ship I had imagined my own ghost and seen my unvanishing footsteps. When you don't belong anywhere it doesn't matter where you are or where you go, if you stay or move on. You arrive at a place where the view forwards and backwards is the same, where the sun rises in the east one day and the west the next, where you stop planning and live like the birds and beasts by intuition and instinct. . Chloe Thurlow

Inside our mind there is hidden place that contains the mind within the mind. There, you will find another version of yourself that may be your true self. We do not find that self by travelling, by searching. We find that self by sitting still, being quiet and looking inside. Ask yourself: who am I? And your true self will answer. Chloe Thurlow

When I was 6 I wanted to be a nurse. When I was 14 I wanted to be a spy or a lion tamer. When I was 16 I wanted too be a highwire walker or an acrobat. Or maybe a clown with a white face. Then I gave up wanting to be anything other than what I am and what I am is a woman with a woman's needs and a woman's desires. Chloe Thurlow

We are trapped in a net of our our own self-doubt, on the programming force fed to us by parents, schools, society. In a certain light, on certain days, you can see that net. And once you can see it, you can learn to make it go away. Chloe Thurlow

If you roll a pearl around your mouth it slowly reveals the dreams of oysters, memories of the sea, the taste of orgasm. Chloe Thurlow

There is a moment when time stops, when the air grows still, when you enter a state of nothingness, a state of purity and perfection. That is the moment to strive for. Chloe Thurlow

Love hurts. Love is fragile. Love comes like a breath of magic, then departs leaving us feeling empty, alone, a paper cup blowing on the wind. Chloe Thurlow

I thought that love would last forever. But nothing is forever. Life is not forever. The only reliable permanence is change. Love hurts because change is painful. Love hurts because love lost is an assault on our ego. We fear that we will fail again and those who live in fear of failure slowly but inevitably fail. Chloe Thurlow

Man was not born to be monogamous. What has changed in the 21st century — at 21 the world surely has come of age — is the understanding that woman is not meant to be monogamous either. Just as love hurts, new love heals. Chloe Thurlow

While love lasts it should be relished, gobbled up like ice cream, explored as the conquistadors explored the unknown continent. But when love evaporates, when love hurts, we must learn to let go of the idea that love is forever. Chloe Thurlow

Love is not a spaceship you construct and then fly off together into the stars. Love is a soap bubble that bursts in the air. Love is the first winter snowflake that falls into you palm, a mirage that glows in the sun and fades in the shadows. Chloe Thurlow

I was always in love with love and now I am in love. In love, everything looks different. Everything tastes different. It is as if you have been reborn, transformed, become another person whom you don't completely recognise. Chloe Thurlow

The moment he left the warm sheets and the door clicked shut, I had that feeling you get when you are lost in a strange town at night. I curled into the chair where he had watched me undress and tears wet my cheeks. Then I dried my eyes, I looked in the mirror, and I said these two words. Never again. Chloe Thurlow

Mummy became a shadow, a woman who had lost herself because she had never found herself. She had always done the right thing, and I had a feeling that the right thing is always going to be the wrong thing, that you find yourself by stepping out of yourself. Chloe Thurlow

Girls love kissing. Our lips replicate the lips we discreetly hide. We redden lips to show the health and allure of our labia, the welcoming of your tongue in our mouth a foretaste of lips moistened and blood-gorged by desire. Some kisses last forever in our minds, some kisses are best forgotten. Every kiss is unique and kissing lips is uniquely human. Chloe Thurlow

The kiss is the greatest of gifts, uniquely human. A kiss before midnight. A kiss before dying. The Judas kiss. The kiss of the devil. A big wet smacker beneath the mistletoe. More can be said with a kiss than a book full of words. We kiss to say I love you. We kiss the rings of the self-important. The feet of the conquerors. The rich dark earth when we reach the promised land. We kiss babies' cheeks to soak up their innocence. We kiss the foreheads of loved ones as they begin a journey. We kiss beautiful strangers in far away places because on hot July nights with the music of the sea and the stars above your head your lips are incomplete until they are joined in a kiss. Chloe Thurlow

We are drawn to repetition. We can watch the tide rolling for hours into shore. The clouds skittering across the sky. We can listen to the pulsing beat of bongo drums and are drawn magnetically to the slap, slap, slap of a girl being chastised. The human is a mystery, even too himself. Chloe Thurlow

The secret is confusion, make it, create it, live it, be it. Chloe Thurlow