Emma Forrest

“I'm in love with someone good and kind and gentle, and he's seen the darkness too, but somehow we've become each other's light.”

“I'm not crazy or dangerous,just a bit eccentric and lonely.”

“The problem with writing a book about bulimia is that whenever you go to the washroom, people think you're throwing up.”

“The truth is I have had, for whatever reason, several movie-star boyfriends.”

“In hindsight, I have no idea why he was ever with me. He thought highly of my breasts. And . . . that's it, I think.”

“There is a blessing in losing the one we love. It's the blessing of self-transformation. You don't have to who you were anymore. You've struggled. And now you can change. It doesn't mean that bits of that person won't cling to you, they will throughout your life, but they are now subsumed into something greater. That person has given you, in fact, the most important blessing, which is they gave you the blessing of transforming your soul into something better, something more beautiful.”

“If killing yourself is not an option anymore, you have to sink into the darkness instead, and make something out of it.”

“When he asked if he was mine, tears in his eyes, I think he knew what he would do, what he would have to do, and he was mourning us. He was mourning us the whole time.”

“The goal was to get sane, to get whole, to be complete enough to support someone else.”

“No one ever loved you like him. And no one ever took it away so completely. But it's here. Look around.”

“Now that he's gone, I feel like I'm a senior citizen who gave away her life savings over the phone. And this is the crux: I never in my life believed in someone as much as I believed in him. The shame is overwhelming.”

“I used to devour biographies of people like Natalie Wood and Marilyn.”

“New York is the first place I have ever felt safe.”

“I say, "Well then I don't know if it was real, and that makes me feel like I'm going insane again.""Absolutely it was real. It was a real, partial picture. Because it ended preemptively, things you would have learned about him in the relationship, you are instead learning in the breakup. You have learned that he has a desperate desire for intimacy and then a desperate desire for the cave. He will get lonely there eventually and come back.""To me?"He doesn't pause. "To someone new.""And I'll have to watch another girl?""You will have to, but you will also know what lies ahead for that poor girl.”

“I think I've lost my faith and I can't stop writingbecause I don't know howmuch longer I can hold on.”

“It is madness. And if you don't know who you are, or if your real self has drifted away from you with the undertow, madness at least gives you an identity. It's the same with self-loathing. You're probably just normal and normal-looking but that's not a real identity, not the way ugliness is. Normality, just accepting that you're probably normal-looking, lacks the force field of self-disgust. If you don't know who you are, madness gives you something to believe in.”

“It's only a heartache. It isn't a tragedy. A tragedy would be losing the father of my children to cancer. This I wrestle with the hardest. There are thirty-one flavors of pain, like Baskin Robbins in hell. Am I allowed to feel pain at a breakup? When there is so much other shit going on in this world? Love is extremely serious. I don't think this is trivial.”

“When he kisses me, I cry. I explain it's not because I wish he were someone else, it's because it's such a shock to the system to be desired after feeling so completely abandoned.”

“Of course he freaked me out. Of course it's nothing to do with me. But none of that matters. He loved me and now he doesn't. I was everything to him and now I am nothing.”

“When I was old enough to know better, I ate a bar of soap in the shape of the Muppets' Fozzie Bear, because I loved him so much I wanted to consume him, even if doing so made me ill. I didn't yet know the word 'foreshadowing.' Fozzie was the only first of many pop-culture icons I feel shaped by.”