6 Quotes by Mikel Jollett

Mom starts to cry because she doesn't know how to get mad. It's like the anger rises up in her and then turns to tears the second it gets to her eyes.

It seemed like writers have the most important job in the world, to make books, to create a connection, a kind of telepathy between two minds in which one can inhabit the other.

So it feels like a ladder I must climb up to the clouds to get away from this emptiness, to be somewhere warm. Except every time I climb it, when I get to the top, there’s nothing there but quiet and cold and another ladder to climb.

I feel like a blank space covered in skin. There is no place for this walking blank thing among the warm beings, the ones with something inside, the people who can have a drink and laugh at a joke and look into their features and see something other than the wretchedness I see in mine, the day that immeasurably thin skin falls away and I simply disappear. Into the ocean. My ocean. The one that will swallow me whole if I let it.

Some people are likable simply because they give off the constant impression that they like you, and something about this trait is calming and easy to trust.

But when these moments end and the buzz is gone and the reality sets in that I know I am lost and that this facsimile, however splendid or romantic, cannot erase the basic feeling that I am alone and it is because I am damaged and it will always be that way, the whole thing seems less like a romantic story and more like an intoxication from which I awake to see the consequences, like those kids on LSD in the 1960s who died thinking they could fly.