Ester Dean Quotes

Sometimes you almost have to laugh to keep from crying to deal with the pain associated with the 'hood.

It is hard work to be good when you are very little and very hungry, and have many sticks to beat you, and no mother's lips to kiss you.

It is the mind that maketh good or ill, That maketh wretch or happy, rich or poor.

In the cellars of the night, when the mind starts moving around old trunks of bad times, the pain of this and the shame of that, the memory of a small boldness is a hand to hold.

I couldn't do it at all. I was never really good at it, but I can't imagine what it can be like as a fortunate person not having to deal with it. I mean, people of all ages, not just my age, 25, 35, all the way down the line.

I didn't have any knowledge of the music industry when I first got to L.A., and I really didn't know on a creative level what I wanted to sound like, so I had to do a lot of experimenting. It led to a spiral of depression and being broke.

All I'm trying to do is survive and make good out of the dirty, nasty, unbelievable lifestyle that they gave me.

Ghettos and barrios and abusive homes and trauma wards may produce scarred souls; they can cripple more human spirits than they strengthen.

Everything's borne out of human experience, of course - rejection, humiliation, poverty, whatever. People aren't born bad, no matter how harsh the circumstances. There is a person in there, and that person is not made of ice.

I grew up in a bookless house with a father and brother who have spent most of their lives in prison, psychiatric hospitals, or living rough, and a mother who has spent her life slaving and scrimping to pay the bills, living a nervous and troubled life.

When you're in hell, you forget how great you really are because you're suffering and you forget the great things you've done.

It became motivation as opposed to something else - the thing about poverty is that it starts affecting your mind and your spirit because people don't see you. I chose from a very young age that I didn't want that for my life. And it very much has helped me appreciate and value the things that are in my life now because I never had it.

Trauma and pain and suffering can be the very thing that dislodges a person from themselves both in awful ways and larger ways that force one to reckon with one's own life.

I'm not in the business of suffering.

You'll beat this. I know it doesn't feel like it, but you will. You're a survivor." "I don't want to survive it." "I know that, too," Nell had said. "And it's fair enough. But sometimes we don't have a choice.

I go - I trace depression back to things. So I go, ok, I look back and I say my self-esteem was affected because of my skin and because my family had no money and I was ashamed of how poor I was. And I look at all of that and I was trying to hide myself. And so I felt like I was less than I was. And so that then leads to you being depressed. And I work on these things.

So to really be able to dive into what does it mean to be broken by an experience, and I developed it just through research and talking and understanding the truth of what it means to lose everything.

Here is The Boy with the Thorn in His Side, dying in your world. A man made monster with every human emotion, overdosed on worthlessness in a world that could never wrap it’s head around him (so don’t even try). When it’s all over just remember every single word you ever said was always just a bullet to his head. Bury him underground between friends and love - the only things that are gonna make it to the end with him. Look for his body buried beneath where the yellow weeds are growing and know he’s still living in his nightmares.

Sometimes to heal, you must first get hurt.

Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that.

I close my eyes. An image flashes—emerging from the van with Julian after our escape from New York City; believing, in that moment, that we had escaped the worst, that life would begin again for us. Instead life has only grown harder.

I can't imagine trying to be in recovery. I mean it would be hard enough with just life going along in a nice way, but then when awful stuff happens, how you maintain the strength to get through it?

When you've suffered a great deal in life, each additional pain is both unbearable and trifling.

It would hurt. But we'll dust ourselves off and we'll come back.

I was in a very dark place for a long time. It's just so hard to have normalcy.