Emotional Reckoning Quotes

I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind's door at 4 A.M. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends.

The thing is, at the end of the day you still have to face yourself.

You are always working towards the moments in which characters experience reckonings or insight or change. I like to track them past those moments.

Writing, I explained, was mainly an attempt to out-argue one's past; to present events in such a light that battles lost in life were either won on paper or held to a draw.

I've learned a lot about myself. Most of it is all right. When I add up the pluses and subtract the minuses, I still come out pretty well.

Fang. I had to do some thinking about him. Me. I had some thinking to do about me too.

I think there is something very relatable in the idea that you hit a certain age, later in your life, where you realize you have to pick up the rug and see what's underneath it and deal with stuff.

It is only the intellect that can be thoroughly and hideously wicked. It can forget everything in the attainment of its ends. The heart recoils; in its retired some drops of childhood's dew still linger, defying manhood's fiery noon.

To me, the horror genre is the genre of non-denial. It's about admitting that there is evil in the world and recognizing that there is evil within us and that we're not in control and that the things that we are afraid of must be confronted in order for us to relinquish that fear.

Quite often in life, when a tragic event arrives it becomes a springboard for mirroring all other things in one's life that one hasn't come to terms with.

Through the process of specifically writing this memoir, there was so much reckoning that I had to do. It was very difficult. It doesn't erase anything that happened, but I think that it was healthy for me to do it. The teenage self-loathing that I suffered from all of a sudden found itself turned into rapids with my grief after my brother died. I turned it inwards. In the same way that my mom processes her grief and her problems. This project, as a memoir, has helped me funnel it outwards.