Sad Girls

“Anxiety is a tricky thing, honey. It’s kind of like the weather, you know? You can have a whole lot of blue skies, then all of a sudden, it goes El fucking Niño on you.”

“I used to think people were like lighthouses. That they were there to protect you. But they’re not. People are like whirlpools. They pull you in; they drag you under. You have to work so hard just to keep your head above water.”

At times, the scenarios I pictured were so graphic they left me wondering whether, perhaps, there is another version of me somewhere that has lived it. Maybe we slip in and out of alternate worlds through our minds and our imaginations, picking up scar tissue from other dimensions.

Black is a shade—one that holds its presence in every gradation of gray, departing only with its transition into white

But you can’t make people listen. They have to come round in their own time

“It’s amazing what people create using their pain. Work that is touched by melancholy has its own unique beauty. Even the word ‘melancholy’ is pretty, the way it rolls on your tongue. I think sadness adds something to literature that is unique. It’s an ingredient like …” I thought for a moment. “Like salt. Salt has that power to completely transform a dish. I think sadness has that same transformative effect in literature.”

“It’s almost like there was only an up and down before him, but now I have discovered you can also go sideways too.

the lie formed a life of its own. It became an evil presence, a curse.

Perhaps I had wanted to create some kind of commotion, something to break the monotony.

But I don’t think all writers are sad. I think it’s the other way around—all sad people write. It’s a form of catharsis, a way of working through things that feel unresolved, like undoing a knot. People who are prone to sadness are more likely to pick up a pen.