Quotes by Nenia Campbell

Did you think Id only want you once? Oh, my, you are more naïve than I thought. Why would I go through so much trouble for a mere tryst? Does a man ride a stallion but one time before condemning it to the abattoir?

I want to be your last thought at night, and your first taste at dawn.

Conquest was not satisfying if it began with a surrender.

Death is one lover who cannot be spurned.

If a woman defined herself solely by the man she was with—and vice versa—the world would be a very shallow and insipid place, indeed.

Maybe it frightened them, to admit that a woman could be master of her fate.

Valys also didnt think I was good enough for him. He made that clear every time he acted like a martyr forced to settle. But what he didnt understand was that if he thought I might not be good enough for him, he definitely wasnt good enough for me. I was well aware of my flaws, but I knew my merits, too; I shouldnt have to be anyones second-best. Least of all, his.

Girls can fight with swords, too. Sometimes, even better than men can. They just have to want it badly enough that theyre willing to work harder at it.

Mámá was fond of saying that nothing tastes as good as skinny feels—an aphorism I was pretty sure shed cribbed from the thinspiration sites she subscribed to online—but I believed that anyone who said such things had never tasted chili-cheese fries with melted cheddar, fresh ground beef, and Tapatio sauce.

Id seen entire constellations of possibility Id never previously been aware of, so blinded had I been by the bright, glaring stars of expectation. Freedom, I was beginning to think, had less to do with where you were, and was more about who you were trying to be.

College had once been my greatest aspiration; it stood for everything my mother did not—intellectualism, feminism, freedom. But being kidnapped had given me plenty of time to think, and somewhere between all that fear and dread, Id realized that was the wrong reason to go to college. That the potential for those things had been inside of me all along, only Id never realized because I hadnt believed myself strong enough to break free without an intermediary.

People rarely ventured outside the realm of their own hurts. They believed their own suffering was obvious to all, but might as well have been wearing blinders for all that they noticed anyone elses.

At first you might wonder what you did to deserve such treatment. Nothing, probably, so that doesnt matter. What matters is that, eventually, the abuse becomes the status quo. Its no longer about the whats and whys (“what did I do?” “why are they doing this?”) but the whens and hows (“when are they going to do it?” “how are they going to get me?”). Persecution becomes inevitable, inescapable. And once you get into the victim mindset, youre fucked. The bullies dont even need to hurt you now; your poor, warped, pathetic brain is doing half the work for them.

Since when did psychiatry become one big, fat Myspace survey?

I was supposed to be powerless, and as a result they failed to see that I possessed claws.

So you thought you could shit and eat at the same time. How disgustingly convenient.

If the whole world seems like its against you, it helps to know that youve still got home. A safe place. It just takes one person—a teacher, a friend, a parent. If I didnt have you and Dad, if you hadnt made it so clear you loved me as much as you did, or if youd said, yeah, why dont you do it, and put yourself out of our misery, just shut up, I would have killed myself. I really would have. I spent most of those days wishing I were dead anyway, and what always stopped me was the fact that doing so would destroy the lives of the only people who ever cared about me.

Maybe in a way all living things are like flickering flames in a precarious night, always on the verge of being extinguished. Whether we kindle slowly but steadily, or go out in a brilliant burst of light and color, is our choice. Perhaps the most important choice well ever have.

Now she knew living was just a brief hiatus, a blip really, in the infinite line of nothingness that composed that shadowy realm of the unknown. It could stop at any time.

It wasnt that she was sad—sadness had very little to do with it, really, considering that most of the time, she felt close to nothing at all. Feeling required nerves, connections, sensory input. The only thing she felt was numb. And tired. Yes, she very frequently felt tired.