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.
Emma ForrestWhat people don't understand when you've already been a suicide and pulled through is that after the sadness comes fear: Where is my mind going with this? I don't want to die. I do not want to die. When you don't have so much control over your own thoughts, over the myriad voices in your head, you don't know where they could go.
Emma ForrestI enjoy films where two characters are coming of age, just different ages. That's why I love 'Paper Moon' so much.
Emma ForrestYou can have this kind of love. You can have it. You just grab it. Of course the problem with having that love is that you can lose it, too.
Emma ForrestNo one ever loved you like him. And no one ever took it away so completely. But it's here. Look around.
Emma ForrestI envied women with signature hair-dos, signature perfumes, signature sign-offs. Novelists who tell Vogue Magazine: โI canโt live without my Smythson notebook, Pomegranate Noir cologne by Jo Malone and Frette sheetsโ. In the grip of madness, materialism begins to look like an admirable belief system.
Emma ForrestThis boy has negative charisma. He walks into a room and the oxygen starts to evaporate. I guess that's why girls sleep with him. They find his awfulness transfixing. He's like a lousy 1970's disaster movie that they can't bring themselves to turn off, even though it is making their life worse every minute they leave it on.
Emma Forrest