Top 100 Kathleen Glasgow Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “People should know about us. Girls who write their pain on their bodies.”

— Kathleen Glasgow

2. “There’s so much I wish I didn’t have to know about living.”

— Kathleen Glasgow

3. “But there isn’t a single word in the universe that you can think of that would describe the way you feel right now.”

— Kathleen Glasgow

4. “I just want to feel better. My own body is my deepest enemy. It wants, it wants, it wants and when it does not get, it cries and cries and I punish it. How can you live in fear of your own body?”

— Kathleen Glasgow

5. “You are carrying so many heavy feelings. There just isn’t enough room for them all.”

— Kathleen Glasgow

6. “Who Knew I’d Make Her So Blue.”

— Kathleen Glasgow

7. “A girl’s life is the worst life in the world. A girl’s life is: you are born, you bleed, you burn.”

— Kathleen Glasgow

8. “That’s how hearts get broken, you know. When you believe in promises.”

— Kathleen Glasgow

9. “I’m so unwhole. I don’t know where all the pieces of me are, how to fit them together, how to make them stick. Or if I even can.”

— Kathleen Glasgow

10. “I’m tired and angry at me. For letting myself get smaller and smaller in the hopes that he would notice me more. But how can someone notice you if you keep getting smaller?”

— Kathleen Glasgow

11. “I cut because I can’t deal. It’s as simple as that. The world becomes an ocean, the ocean washes over me, the sound of water is deafening, the water drowns my heart, my panic becomes as large as planets. I need to hurt myself more than the world can hurt me, and then I can comfort myself.”

— Kathleen Glasgow

12. “You can’t break my heart, she cries, breathy and furious. You can’t own my soul. What I have, I made, what I have is mine. What I have I made, what I have is mine.”

— Kathleen Glasgow

13. “You can’t put your life on hold for somebody else, you know? Sometimes you just have to do what you have to do to make yourself happy. And if you’re not, like, solid with yourself, how can you help somebody else?”

— Kathleen Glasgow

14. “Everyone has that moment I think, the moment when something so momentous happens that it rips your very being into small pieces. And then you have to stop. For a long time, you gather your pieces. And it takes such a very long time, not to fit them back together, but to assemble them in a new way, not necessarily a better way. More, a way you can live with until you know for certain that this piece should go there, and that one there.”

— Kathleen Glasgow

15. “It’s sort of like that poem: I thought I was done with death, at least a little bit, but death wasn’t done with me.”

— Kathleen Glasgow

16. “Cutting is a fence you build upon your own body to keep people out but then you cry to be touched. But the fence is barbed. What then?”

— Kathleen Glasgow

17. “Everything and everybody that’s busted can be fixed. That’s what I think.”

— Kathleen Glasgow

18. “I need to hurt myself more than the world can hurt me.”

— Kathleen Glasgow

19. “I’m running blind, ghosts swallowing me.”

— Kathleen Glasgow

20. “Sometimes you’re so hungry, so thirsty for something to fill you up, you’ve craved it for so long, but when you finally have it, it hurts going down. It’s not a medicine for what ails you. It might just be the thing that is keeping you sick.”

— Kathleen Glasgow

21. “People aren’t nice, people aren’t nice, you should know that by now.”

— Kathleen Glasgow

22. “I’m always losing things.”

— Kathleen Glasgow

23. “That’s what was in my head in the attic when I took broken glass from my tender kit and began to cut myself into tiny pieces.”

— Kathleen Glasgow

24. “They say money makes you happy. It doesn’t. It just makes you more comfortable in your grief.”

— Kathleen Glasgow

25. “I would have done anything for that feeling, and did. I wish I could feel that way now, to make all the awfulness inside me go away. But I can’t. I just have to sit here, and feel all of it. Every last horrible thing.”

— Kathleen Glasgow

26. “Now, as then, I don’t know if I fully understand what happens in the novel, but I loved it anyway. Isn’t that strange? To love something you can’t fully grasp?”

— Kathleen Glasgow

27. “Last night scared me, how calm I felt, thinking about killing myself. The S word.”

— Kathleen Glasgow

28. “Someone I used to know said that’s the problem with adults. They just see kids as they want them to be, what they aren’t, and not as they are. I think about that all the time. Like, how much time and pain and suffering could be eliminated if you just accepted the kid in front of you and stopped trying to fix them. Maybe there is no “fixing.” Maybe there is just heartbreak and love and trying to help them stay alive, whatever it takes.”

— Kathleen Glasgow

29. “Books are good. I can live life safely and without peril in a fictional universe.”

— Kathleen Glasgow

30. “That your whole life, it seems like no one ever really sees you, they just see what they want to see, what they need to see. They never see the holes inside you.”

— Kathleen Glasgow

31. “I want to hurt everyone right now. I want to break things so the world looks like how I feel inside: splintered into a million bloody and sharp pieces.”

— Kathleen Glasgow

32. “Sometimes I forget that people can be kind. That you don’t have to ask them. They just are.”

— Kathleen Glasgow

33. “No one will love us. Not in a normal way. -pg 56.”

— Kathleen Glasgow

34. “I remember the stars that night. They were like salt against the sky, like someone spilled the shaker against very dark cloth. That mattered to me, their accidental beauty.”

— Kathleen Glasgow

35. “She’s not a cookie, or a book, or a record on a shelf. You can’t just play with her and then put her back.”

— Kathleen Glasgow

36. “I think you are having a different sort of heartbreak. Maybe a kind of heartbreak of being in the world when you don’t know how to be. If that makes any sense?”

— Kathleen Glasgow

37. “Self-harm is not a grab for attention. It doesn’t mean you are suicidal. It means you are struggling to get out of a very dangerous mess in your mind and heart and this is your coping mechanism. It means that you occupy a small space in the very real and very large canyon of people who suffer from depression or mental illness.”

— Kathleen Glasgow

38. “I need release, I need to hurt myself more than the world can hurt me, and then I can comfort myself.”

— Kathleen Glasgow

39. “I blink at myself. I could be a girl, a real girl. I could be a possibility, with Mikey. Couldn’t I?”

— Kathleen Glasgow

40. “After he died, my mother was like a crab: she tucked everything inside and left only her shell.”

— Kathleen Glasgow

41. “I’m so lonely in the world I want to peel all of my flesh off and walk, just bone and gristle, straight into the river, to be swallowed.”

— Kathleen Glasgow

42. “I don’t feel sad. For just now, I don’t feel scared. I feel, for right now, well, kind of triumphant.”

— Kathleen Glasgow

43. “Each aberration of my skin is a song. Press your mouth against me. You will hear so much singing.”

— Kathleen Glasgow

44. “Maybe people just use different things to fill up the emptiness. Until it becomes less about feeling empty and more about feeding something else.”

— Kathleen Glasgow

45. “He’s like the desert itself: it’s so beautiful, it’s so warm, but there are sharp edges everywhere that you have to watch out for.”

— Kathleen Glasgow

46. “They should tell you, right when you get here, that that part of wishing is over. What we’ve done, no one will love us. Not in a normal way.”

— Kathleen Glasgow

47. “How dare you waste a life you haven’t even lived yet.”

— Kathleen Glasgow

48. “The thing about being invisible is, you’d think it would feel light and airy and easy, no pressure, but it doesn’t. It’s the heaviest thing I’ve ever known.”

— Kathleen Glasgow

49. “It could be disappointment, too, Tiger, and you need to prepare yourself for that. But if it’s disappointing, it doesn’t have to be devastating, does that make sense? Life has this, life has that, and then something else comes along again, like a wave. We ride the waves. You go down, you go up, you go down, sometimes you just drift.”

— Kathleen Glasgow

50. “What’s really important is the essence of the life lived. A college degree isn’t going to tell me how well somebody lived, now is it? Does having a boat mean you lived a good life? Or a summerhouse? What about saving each valentine your son made or even working a roadside jam stand? A million, what do they call it? – selfies – on some silly website. What does it all mean, in the end?”

— Kathleen Glasgow