The collection / 29 fragments

The living archive

Passages, proverbs, and questions carried across the ages.

SearchTypeTopicEraCulture / collection labelCountry attributionTraditionOrder

Author

Leave empty for every voice. Browse all authors ↗

Reset

Culture labels and country attributions follow the source collections; earliest origins may be unknown.

29 results · Page 1 of 2Play this collection ▷

01Undated

Who fixes broken people? Is it only other broken people, ones who've already been ruined? And do we need to be fixed? It was the messiness and hurt in our pasts that drove us, and that same hurt connected us at a subdermal level, the kind of scars written so deeply in your cells that you can't even see them anymore, only recognize them in someone else.

Leah Raeder / quote

↗

02Undated

Part of falling in love with someone is actually falling in love with yourself. Realizing that you're gorgeous, you're fearless and unpredictable, you're a firecracker spitting light, entrancing a hundred faces that stare up at you with starry eyes.

Leah Raeder / quote

↗

03Undated

I was so sure this was different, the kind of story they made movies and books about, but in the end it was just a summer to a summer, a dizzying breath of honeysuckle and whiskey and candle smoke, inhaled, held, let go.

Leah Raeder / quote

↗

04Undated

Most of the time romance isn't even about love, anyway. It's about escape. Fantasy. Salvation from the mundane. Save me from boredom, from exhaustion, from my undersexed body, from microwave dinners and reality TV, from going to bed alone with a vibrator or a cat. Save me from my desperately ordinary life.

Leah Raeder / quote

↗

05Undated

Maybe all you need to pull you back form the ledge is to know someone would miss you if you fell.

Leah Raeder / quote

↗

06Undated

Anyone who's happy in a world this fucked-up has some serious psychological issues. You think I'm crazy because I see things as they are. You'd rather put on Disneyland goggles and watch TV and pretend it's fine. It's not crazy if I see monsters when I live in a fucking nightmare.

Leah Raeder / quote

↗

07Undated

I'm not over you. I dream about you every night. I watch that fucking video over and over just to hear your voice. Does that make you happy? Is that proof I cared?

Leah Raeder / quote

↗

08Undated

If you think you can stand looking and not touching for eight months, you're welcome to try.""Try' being the operative word," he said, sighing. "No, I can't. And I don't want to try.

Leah Raeder / quote

↗

09Undated

Suicide isn't really about death, though. It's about change. Release.

Leah Raeder / quote

↗

10Undated

Every time I opened my mouth, flame licked up my throat. I could have razed villages, kidnapped princesses.

Leah Raeder / quote

↗

11Undated

We looked at each other with that resentment you feel when you want something so much it’s causing you pain, so much you start to hate it a little.

Leah Raeder / quote

↗

12Undated

Some girls had mothers who never called them beautiful but swore their love up and down. It's all the same, really. All bullshit.

Leah Raeder / quote

↗

13Undated

I couldn’t tear my eyes from the window, wanting to drink in as much of St. Louis as I could, knowing somewhere out there, one of those infinitesimally small lights was him. I wondered if he’d look up and see the planes crossing the sky like shooting stars, knowing one of those lights was me.

Leah Raeder / quote

↗

14Undated

Kintsugi is a pottery technique. When something breaks, like a vase, they glue it back together with melted gold. Instead of making the cracks invisible, they make them beautiful. To celebrate the history of the object. What it's been through. And I was just... Thinking of us like that. My heart full of gold veins, instead of cracks.

Leah Raeder / quote

↗

15Undated

The brain is an incredible multitasker. At the same time that it’s piercing itself with superheated needles of anguish, it’s ruthlessly making plans, contingencies, plotting out a future, giving zero fucks whether it’ll ever see it. On the day I die, it’ll be calculating what to have for dinner as it bombards itself with pain signals from my amputated legs or my clocked-out heart.

Leah Raeder / quote

↗

16Undated

If two people could make each other smile and laugh and forget all the pain and darkness in the world for a moment, why should we feel ashamed of it?

Leah Raeder / quote

↗

17Undated

But every stroke of the brush, every lyric, every word whispered between human beings resulted from the pain of being alone. In our haunted heads, our imperfect bodies. Islands carved from clay and bone, our skulls like shells full of mist.

Leah Raeder / quote

↗

18Undated

If I was gay, I wouldn't need an asterisk beside my name. I could stop worrying if the girl I like will bounce when she finds out I also like dick. I could have a coming-out party without people thinking I just want attention. I wouldn't have to explain that I fall in love with minds, not genders or body parts. People wouldn't say I'm 'just a slut' or 'faking it' or 'undecided' or 'confused.' I'm not confused. I don't categorize people by who I'm allowed to like and who I'm allowed to love. Love doesn't fit into boxes like that. It's blurry, slippery, quantum. It's only limited by our perceptions and before we slap a label on it and cram it into some category, everything is possible.

Leah Raeder / quote

↗

19Undated

I am not the heroine of this story.And I'm not trying to be cute. It's the truth. I'm diagnosed borderline and seriously fucked-up. I hold grudges. I bottle my hate until it ferments into poison, and then I get high off the fumes. I'm completely dysfunctional and that's the way I like it, so don't expect a character arc where I finally find Redemption, Growth, and Change, or learn How to Forgive Myself and Others.

Leah Raeder / quote

↗

20Undated

You know, rust is just oxidation. The same chemical process as fire. Oxygen interacts with steel, electrons drift from one element to the other. So really, rust is a slow fire. Isn't that weird? Water causes something to burn.

Leah Raeder / quote

↗

21Undated

Girls get under each other's skin. We get too close, too attached, too crazy, and then we can't let go. Our claws sink too deep. When we separate, we tear each other apart.

Leah Raeder / quote

↗

22Undated

The brain is an incredible multitasker. At the same time that it's piercing itself with superheated needles of anguish, it's ruthlessly making plans, contingencies, plotting out a future, giving zero fucks whether it'll ever see it.

Leah Raeder / quote

↗

23Undated

In a typical college romance novel, he'd be a gorgeous but troubled sex god who'd cure all my deep-seated psych issues with a good hard fuck. I'd smell his misogyny and abusive tendencies from miles off but my brain would turn to hormone soup because abs. That's the formula. Broken girl + bad boy = sexual healing. All you need to fix that tragic past is a six-pack. More problems? Add abs.It's Magic Dick Lit.

Leah Raeder / quote

↗

24Undated

If there's a better definition of love than mutual benevolent insanity, I haven't heard it.

Leah Raeder / quote

↗