6 Quotes by Grace Bowman

I can spend the whole day lying. I don’t actually tell any lies, I just act out one big one. I feel guilty for that. I don’t want to let you down. I would really like to fold up within myself. Things might be better like that. I should be able to get properly depressed, but I can’t. Sometimes I can’t even make myself cry. Even if I think of the saddest part of me there is just a blankness. I don’t have much to say, so I stare in the mirror until I lose myself.

One of these is a wish to please their parents and to be universally liked. A result of this is that they have not allowed themselves, or been allowed, to express feelings of anger or upset, nor have they felt that they have the voice to do so.

It’s like my kind of control isn’t acceptable. You can hear it in the voices of strangers when I tell them I don’t drink tea or coffee and, ‘No thank you, I don’t drink alcohol either.

It is hard to locate the right memories for a beginning: to decide which ones are relevant to the overall picture. We always take ourselves back to the start to try and find out why things happened; to try and force some blame into some day or some month or into some half-shaded memory.

She feels like time is pulsing beneath her and inside her and yet she can’t understand how it works. She can’t seem to find herself in the present; she is always ahead of it. She is not speaking or acting or even thinking in it. She can’t understand it; it makes no sense.

They buy me whatever I want. I could order any food from anywhere in the world, and they would make sure I had it. I hate that. I hate the fact they think they know what I will eat, and what I won’t. I am an adult! They even buy me rice cakes. I don’t like it that they know that I eat rice cakes. It was my secret.