Wendelin Van Draanen Quotes

I'm obsessed with adolescence. I love to write about people in their 20s. It's such a fraught and exciting and kind of horrible time.

I became conflicted in my late teens.

The film is about Joe discovering who his mother and father are and his relationship with them, and the identity crisis he goes through once he finds out who his parents are.

At his heart, Shakespeare was a YA author. So many of his plays are set with high school-aged characters. He understood the passion, the confusion and drama that marks that life stage.

I kinda went through a semi-depression. Honestly. Like, I lost myself.

A lot of my YA novels are about family problems.

You know, we all have our inner demons. I, for one - I can't speak for you, but I'm on the verge of moral collapse at any time. It can happen by the end of the show.

Most of what I've written songs about are things that come out of the confusing emotional, spiritual and psychological period of time when you're going through puberty.

From January to December of 2019, I crumbled, to be real, and I think by the end of 2019 I had beaten myself up in every possible way to the point where I wasn't even a person. I was fully at rock bottom.

I'm more interested in the psychic intricacies that they build up and try to run away from, and how they self-construct. A lot of my work is about self-construction. Here, it's those folks who are deeply wounded and bewildered. They're not just victims of trauma; they've been shaken so forcefully that they don't quite know how or where to stand.

I felt like I was literally losing myself as being the joyful, spiritual, passionate, exciting woman that I naturally had been.

Love was undoubtedly one of the things capable of changing a person's whole life from one moment to the next. But there's the other side of the coin, the second thing that could make a human being take a totally different course from one he or she had planned; and that was called despair. Yes, perhaps love really could transform someone, but despair did the job more quickly.

I live in the borderlands. The word ghost sounds like memory. The word therapy means exorcism. My visions echo and multiplymultiply. I don't know how to figure out what they mean. I can't tell where they start or if they will end. But I know this. If they shrink my head any more, or float me away on an ocean of pills, I will never return.

I'm not much like myself any more.

I went through this difficult time [in the 1984] when we were making our third record where I kind of lost my mind. That's when the bulimia kicked in. And that's when I got really freaky.

Even when I look straight into the milky blue eyes I can't find myself any more. When did I stop being me?

Sometimes it is painful to be oneself; at other times it seems impossible to escape oneself.

Now all that's left of me, is what I pretend to be. So together, but so broken up inside.

All of the sudden," he said, "I feel different-- not like I ever felt before. Even when Papa died I didn't feel this way. In two days everything is changed. I'm lonely and I don't now what I'm lonely for

Great. She shook her head. Not only am I having conversations with myself, but now I'm refusing to talk to me. This has got to be the first sign of madness.

I have all the characteristics of a human being: blood, flesh, skin, hair; but not a single, clear, identifiable emotion, except for greed and disgust. Something horrible is happening inside of me and I don't know why. My nightly bloodlust has overflown into my days. I feel lethal, on the verge of frenzy. I think my mask of sanity is about to slip.

I rose to my knees, mouth dry and heart pounding, and paused to finger a rip in my beautiful Dacron bowling shirt. I pushed my fingertip through the hole and wiggled it at myself. Hello, Dexter, where are you going? Hello, Mr. Finger. I don't know, but I'm almost there. I hear my friends calling.

So you want to know all about me. Who I am. What chance meeting of brush and canvas painted the face you see? What made me despise the girl in the mirror enough to transform her,turn her to into a stranger, only not. So you want to hear the whole story. Why I swerved off the high road, hard left to nowhere, recklessly indifferent to those coughing my dust, picked up speed no limits,no top end, just a high velocity rush to madness.

something is always falling apart in me.

Isn't it true that you start your life a sweet child believing in everything under your father's roof? Then comes the day of the Laodiceans, when you know you are wretched and miserable and poor and blind and naked, and with the visage of a gruesome grieving ghost you go shuddering through nightmare life.