9 Quotes by Sarah Elaine Smith

These were people where the middle part of them had been rotted and eaten by something that never saw the daylight. Whatever was in them stayed hidden and got muscles. And once it had muscles, it did all the talking. I saw it. Hello, myself, I said.

I felt good. I usually had a window of optimism after I bathed, which wore off by the time I was dry again. But for just then, I was washed. I was hungry in a clean right way I hadn't found in some time.

Like most evil, I supposed, mine was only a hurt hiding in whatever materials were near. My hurt had no imagination for other people.

I wished I had thought to go missing. And I wanted to be famous. I wanted all the hidden hearts to search for me. I wanted to sparkle in the vast outline of the gone, because the gone took up the whole sky and air.

At home, I found it helped me, this habit of dwelling only in the things I could see. I could crawl from one moment to the blank vista of the next...Moment, moment, moment. I shaved off one moment and left it behind.

I couldn’t remember why I had ever been afraid to walk in the woods at night. It was all creatures, and I was a creature. Everything was legal between me and the rest.

There is a part of you that will always live outside your body, in the stars.

I'm the kind who can only see the road ahead so far. I'm the kind that has to get empty somehow. I tried all the other ways. The only one that wouldn't kill me was taking care of friends and wildlife.

...and wasn’t love a series of things you did in spite of how wild they were? Love is crazy, and this was crazy, so it must be love. It must.