The First Time She Drowned
Kerry Kletter
Top 10 Best Quotes
“It was when I discovered that there are two kinds of death. There is ceasing to exist, usually accompanied by a funeral and loved ones in mourning. And then there is emotional death born out of necessity and measured solely by the absence of grief it causes: the turning off the lights of oneself in order to shut down the feelings of being alive.”
“That's the weirdest thing about being cut off from life. Everything gets washed out or muted or recedes into the background except for other people's laughter. Other people's laughter gets very loud and jarring. It penetrates. It is a reminder that other people live.”
“Part of being healthy is being able to hold and remember who people actually are instead of who we wish they were. It's a daily struggle against a brain that tends to want to cling to fairy-tale hope, but it's also the only way to guarantee a life surrounded by those who build rather than destroy. In the end, the loss is about letting go of what I never had in the first place.”
“Suddenly I don't even care that I fell, because of that brief moment when I stood, and I wonder if this is what other people seem to have that I do not--this courage to fall because they have memory of standing.”
“Because just like all the other times I've drowned in my life, I'm determined to keep paddling forward, to believe that none of it has affected me at all.”
“who insisted every day that I see my own worth beyond my mother’s rejecting eyes. But of course, a mother’s eyes are the very first mirror we look into, the image that gets imprinted on our souls—whether they gaze back at us with love or with disgust. So I don’t know how to differentiate between her perceptions of me and my own when hers were the first I’ve ever known, so deeply ingrained from the second I hit the world.”
“Wondering whether it's worse to be with other people and have nowhere to hide or to be so alone that no one can find you.”
“I have seen this happen before, how one act of parental kindness across a history of cruelty can make a kid in here forgive everything that came before simply because they have been deprived of kindness for so long.”
“His words are like seawater to the shipwrecked: I'm tempted to drink them in, and at the same time, they feel dangerously deceptive.”
“They say the farther away you are from the beach, the louder it sounds. That way it's always with you and you can always find your way back.”
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Book Keywords:
soul, life, mind, depression, laughter
