1
Books were already a familiar refuge, after all, and they still took me in without the slightest judgment. They don’t close to you the way a person can. You might feel as though you don’t belong anywhere, least of all in your own home, you might feel bound to a person whose actions you abhor yet unable to divorce yourself, struggling to individuate in their shadow–“all these feelings you wouldn’t dare articulate to another person, no matter how highly trained–but you can bring your whole untempered self to books. You can ask them anything, and though you may need to search for the resonant lines, though the answer may come at a slant, they will always speak to you, they will always let you in. .Carolina De Robertis
2
Words are incomplete and yet we need them. They are the cups that give our memories shape, and keep them from trickling away.Carolina De Robertis
3
In that moment, I realized that no matter what words I chose and no matter how much time I spent in telling, I would never be able to express my full experience.. There are some experiences that only you can enter, that only you can truly hold. They are too vast to be imparted. You cannot even hold them wholly in your arms: they spill over into the dark beyond you, brimming, shooting out in ropes of light that make you ache with loneliness and yet yoke you to the world at the same time, because the vast things that have happened to you, however terrible, were always born out of the world, and so perhaps they offer you a place even as they push you out of another, even as they weigh you down with a self that can never fully be conveyed. Though most of us will try. We make bonds, we grow trust, we tell stories; we strive to articulate what it took to become who we are. Sometimes if we're very fortunate, our listeners can catch authentic glimpses of what we mean to say, like sparks in a dark room, but never the whole of it at once, not even with the best of friends or closest lover, because the whole of it at once is beyond speaking. It lives nowhere, absolutely nowhere, except inside your skin. That's where it flares, enormous, hazardous, utterly yours.Carolina De Robertis
4
What makes the self? Experiences. Acculturation.What else? I don't know. What's within you. She says, I don't know what was within me and what got put there by my life as it was lived. You can never know that. No. But there is a you that was there before you were born and that nobody shaped or changed or could have changed.Carolina De Robertis
5
No, I wanted to say, he didn't cut off her hands because he didn't have to, he had cut them off long before, with years of keeping all authority in his own palms, all the rules and all the power and all the answers emanating from him and no one else. And if you don't understand that, if you've never been in such a family, then you can't know the way the mind shackles itself and amputates its own limbs so adeptly that you never think to miss them, never think that you had anything so obscene as choice.Carolina De Robertis
6
But in the morning I would always rise and polish the surface of myself, a gleaming, confident young woman, an excellent student and good daughter starting her fourth year at the university, moving smoothly through the world, and even though inside the chaos scraped and railed I would push it into the crevices of the day so it could not be detected.Carolina De Robertis
7
I wondered whether I had gone insane. If so, I thought, then this is what it feels like; I would never have guessed the world would still appear so sharp and vivid, the streets the same, the clouds the same, nothing different except your mind has come unhinged, its cogs whirling loose and wild and hazardous.Carolina De Robertis