I gave you my heart, but it wasn't enough.

Gus leaned back in his chair, appearing satisfied."Good," he said. "Cause Maggie's all the nightmare I can take."I smiled. "Gus, I never knew you dreamed of me." He gave me a one-fingered salute

But as the girl timidly accosted him, he gave a convulsive movement and saved hisrespectability by a vigorous side-step. He did not risk it to save a soul. For how was he toknow that there was a soul before him that needed saving?

My wakeup call wasn’t some light switch of empowerment. From as early as preschool I feared that if I didn’t grow up to be the pretty princess men fawned over, I was a failure. That mentality was my disease. It got me raped. It made me feel dirty and devalued because my cherry wasn’t popped on a bed of rose petals. It fueled an adolescence juggling starvation and vomiting until my throat bled out and my stomach acid burned through the plumbing. It made me snort coke, smoke meth, and routinely gulp down narcotic petri dishes in hopes of obtaining hallucinogenic intimacy with junkie boyfriends. But most of all, it made me waste my youth chasing, obsessing over, fighting for, worshipping, clinging to, and crying over one after another loser. At some point, I just quit giving a fuck.

Incarceration is when nobody writes a happy ending for a woman without a man.

Children are often like hostages under the care of authority, with spankings and groundings nudging them like guns pointed at their skulls, threatening to shoot if the wrong words are uttered.

Southerners have mastered picking, choosing, and rationalizing religious texts to fit their social agenda better than their own mother’s fried chicken recipe.

I won't do that when I'm a parent. I'll make different mistakes, of course.

Are you following me?" she asks, but doesn't meet my gaze."Yeah," I say."Why?"I give her the only honest and true answer I have. "You're where I want to be.

Why shouldn't I be introspective? We dont' make sense.""Neither do Chocolate and Peanut Butter, but it somehow works." He says "Somehow the mixture of two things is genius.

We were sexual targets, marked as eternal sluts for exploring the desires only acceptable in men.

I was nothing but a failure. A fucked-up, broken shame.I was nothing but this emptiness. A shell ruined by fame.Don’t be afraid to shatter, baby, if that will set you free.I’ll find you in the pieces and that will unbreak me.

Good,’ he said. ‘Cause Maggie’s all the nightmare I can take.’I smiled. ‘Gus, I never knew you dreamed of me.’He gave me a one-fingered salute.