Shannon Celebi

“Wine and a straitjacket. That pretty much sums it up.”

“Then the weeks rolled by in a sinister psych ward haze filled with white-coated orderlies and rocking whack-job patients torn straight from some old Jack Nicholson film, all anti-psychotic meds and padded lonely cells...”

“Cuz I can count on one hand the men who’ve loved me, not in the Biblical sense—I don’t have enough digits for that—but who have truly loved me.”

“Using one’s beauty was the only way a smart girl could get by, at least that’s how it was back then, though even for a smart girl there were really only three professions. You could be a nurse or a teacher or a wife.”

“All I cared about that summer were suntans, beaches, boys and booze.”

“Instead, I opened my eyes to find the thing in front of my face, wafting dead horse breath across my chin and up my nose, its mouth like a gaping maw; its eyes, two giant wormholes, twisting and bending with some apparitional substance that could have been space and time if I’d known anything about physics.”

“She was no stripper with a heart of gold, that was for sure. A heart of steel, more like.”

“Writing is a solitary business. It’s just you and your characters and a blank page you need to fill.”

“A woman brings so much more to the world than birth, for she can birth discovery, intelligence, invention, art, just as well as any man.”

“My sister and I are so close that we finish each other’s sentences and often wonder who’s memories belong to whom.”

“She also understood there was a hole in her heart where her son should be, that she was a wicked, selfish woman for wishing him back.”

“When I was twenty-something, I asked my father, “When did you start feeling like a grownup?” His response: “Never.”

“Okay, I’ll just jump right out and say it. I have anxiety issues.”

“Once upon a long ago time I was a girl with hopeful halos in my eyes—not unlike you—not a typical beauty but beautiful nonetheless, as all young girls tend to be in their prime, even if they don’t tend to know it.”

“I am forever an advocate of books, both the reading of them and the writing. There is something sacred to me in that community. Because writing--and reading--is a solitary business. And it’s good to know I’m not alone.”

“The bottom line was that I was in an abusive relationship.”

“We didn’t want to admit it then, but we were friends. Best friends.”

“Just five minutes, God, I chant like some hostage negotiator on the brink of a resolution. Five minutes alone. Please, please. Please.”

“It’s not like I planned it. I never woke up from some rosy dream and said, “Okay, world, today I’m gonna spaz.”

“You’re saying, “What the hell am I gonna do with her?” You’re saying, “Shit, did she take her pills?” You’re saying, “Once upon a time, I used to have a little girl.”