182 Quotes by Aspen Matis

After twelve years of trying, I just decided to stop missing.

It was suddenly Technicolor clear: the only thing holding me from giving myself vision this entire time had actually simply been me. I saw how in the fall and winter of my childhood, I'd walked through the golden aspens. And then I simply committed and gave myself my own eyes. I had once again proven that again alone, I was again enough.

We aren’t afraid of what we can explain.But the truth is stranger than an aimless road, it always was. The world was full of blinding mysteries, and I was blind to truth of what they were. There were things about the world I couldn’t understand.

She told me that women who wore makeup had bad values. Putting on makeup would have been a statement—a rebellion. I didn’t try it. I grew to feel guilty for wanting to feel attractive.

Children believe they are immortal, death is an empty word like the name of a country they’ve never been to on a time-faded map. I wasn’t a child anymore.

Helplessness didn't have to be my identity, I wasn't condemned to it. I was willing - able - to change. Our enmeshment had been enabled by my belief that I needed [my mom] to help me, to take care of things for me - and to save me - but, back in the home where I'd learned this helplessness, I found I no longer felt that I was trapped in it.

She was my mirror image, slightly distorted, flipped, older, larger, more able to coexist with a pack of men. I’d be their pawn. She was their queen.

I flushed—this time not in shame—but in rage.

After all this time questioning whether I could trust myself, my instinct had proven right — I’d found a path in pathless woods.