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21 " Mine is not a smiling face. Strangers on the street always say, Smile! But my muscles do not naturally go there. "
― Hilary Thayer Hamann , Anthropology of an American Girl
22 " It was then that I began to write. Writing helps when you can't talk to your friends; it wasn't that my friends were untrustworthy, it's just that I would never discuss something that was hardly real as though it were really real. Often people do this, forcing friends into authenticating an imaginary life. "
23 " Now that I'd experienced being a woman to a man I was in love with, I'd become self-conscious about being a woman to the world in general. Of course, being female is always indelicate and extreme, like operating heavy machinery. Every woman knows the feeling of being a stack of roving flesh. Sometimes all you've accomplished by the end of the day is to have maneuvered your body through space without grave incident. "
24 " Say it ' he said the words caught at the base of his throat. 'No one.' 'No one ' I sad I swore 'but you.' I said it because it was true. There was no one but him and there never would be. I loved him with pain and with something greater than pain with a barren ache that pealed not in the heart but in the desert dry alongside it. I know it was so even then: if in his arms I was a woman beyond them I was nothing. "
25 " Optimism is when you're not sure where life is going to take you, so naturally you anticipate the best possible outcome "
26 " Hell is only loneliness, a place without play for the soul, a place without God. How could there be God in loneliness when God is presence? "
27 " I shook my head. I couldn't remember the time before, or the way it used to be. There were things we used to do, factual things, and those were easy to recall--playing, biking, singing. As for the things we'd conjured and believed, those were harder to recapture. I wondered if ideals existed only because there was so much to be learned in the loss of them, "
28 " Sometimes all you’ve accomplished by the end of the day is to have maneuvered your body through space without grave incident. "
29 " Sometimes a day is a symbolic day, and you behave symbolically. Sometimes you search inside for a feeling, and, finding none, you remember that no feeling is frequently the most possible feeling. "
30 " It was strange to experience in one night the difference between wanting something you cannot have and having something you cannot want. I wished it wasn't my time to learn it. No one else seemed to be learning much of anything. "
31 " Boys will be boys, that's what people say. No one ever mentions how girls have to be something other than themselves altogether. We are to stifle the same feelings that boys are encouraged to display. "
32 " This is where I falter. This is where I lose myself. This is where years invert and minutes reverse and ideas of what was good and right upend. This is where time is dispersed, thrown down like leaves or stones to be read.It's difficult to say what really happened. I know that my heartache was indescribable, the depth of my loneliness astonishing. I know that I worked very hard, and I never intended to hurt anyone. I cannot describe a life dispossessed of happiness. "
33 " My hand reaches for his eye. He does not pull away but breathes into my touch. His normal lid drifts closed, and beneath my fingertips the distended one throbs, as if the eye below is straining to see. In his heart there is a girl; she is me. No contract keeps her; she goes with him, she goes alone, precipice to precipice, on every ledge agreeing again to leap. She is with him, she has been with him, every minute. No one can know what we know. Just us. If you listen, you can hear it. In the wide sound of the rain-us. "
34 " Kindness is everything...When you receive it and express it, it becomes the whole meaning of things, a place out of self. "
35 " But in fact there are infinite subtleties to identity-that is to say, there is the way that you are, which is the sum of the way you are becoming and the way you have been, which does not take into account the way you secretly wish to be. "
36 " Envy is awful. Unlike jealousy, which comes from the threat of losing what you cherish, envy is a dark desire for things over which you have no right or claim. "
37 " I wondered if Kate would harden as my mother had when she was young and her own mother died. Some people exist quite well in injury. It's like having gills to breathe underwater. Some people are clever about not drawing others into their affliction. You could hardly tell by looking at my mother that she was a stranger to providence. "
38 " The families of graduating seniors emptied out of cars, sheepish in uncommon splendor, like milling clans at the origin of a parade. There is something spent about the families of teenagers; possibly it's the look of exhausted loyalties. Perhaps it's only right that we grow overbig in someone else's space. Perhaps we need to tire and differentiate, leave and adapt. "
39 " What is freedom when you're too beholden to act spontaneously "
40 " The sea slapped ominously, confessing its strategic impartiality. The sea is an international sea, and the sky a universal sky. Often we forget that. Often we think that what is verging upon us is ours alone. We forget that there are other sides entirely. "