23 Quotes by Lauren Slater

They cleared swiftly, dramatically, like a stage set or a movie; we went from black to stunning blue, the day emerging at once wet and crisp, the trees dripping jewels, the flowers drunk on drinking, their heads lolling with dizzy delight, rivulets etched into our earth, showing us which way the rain ran, downhill, of course, heading, all water, straight for our yet-to-be-pond.

I was born from nothing and to nothing I will return. And yet, when i say the word nothing, when i admit, at last, ‘I am nothing,’ i feel mysteriously like something again, ground zero, genesis, the pull of possibilities.

Wounds, I think, are never confined to a single skin but reach out to rasp us all.

The most miraculous moments of my life were not when my daughter and son were born, but when the second or third Prozac pill shot down my throat and catapulted me into a world called sane.

Sickness is the natural state in which we humans reside. We occasionally fall into brief brackets of health, only to return to our fevers, our infections, our rapid, minute mutations, which take us toward death even as they evolve us, as a species, into some ill-defined future.

All it takes is the right training, and we step out, over the boundaries of our bodies and their limitations.

There is betrayal here, in what I do, but in betrayal I am finally camouflaged.

Everyone knows that a lot of memoirs have made-up scenes; it’s obvious. And everyone knows that half the time at least fictions contain literal autobiographical truths. So how do we decide what’s what, and does it even matter?

How do you describe emptiness? Is it the air inside a bubble, the darkness in a pocket, snow? I think, yes, I was six when or seven when I first felt it, the dwindling that is depression.