Aspen Matis, Girl In The Woods: A Memoir Quotes

Rest fixed most things. Sleep was my sweet reward. I treated bedtime as both incentive and sacrament.

I was no longer following a trail. I was learning to follow myself.

I needed only to allow myself to know what I already knew.

In lovesickness we had found a common language.

I wanted to come close to fierce wild things. They seemed prehistoric, rare and sacred.

She taught me only how to need to be taken care of. I was here because I needed to learn to take responsibility for making my own decisions — to earn my own trust.

These tools were my parents’ way of saying: What you’re doing is important. We support it. We want to help you find your way.

I was desperate not to confront the fact that this really could be it—that "nineteen" didn't matter, that there really was a point at which even young bodies fail. I was not immortal.

Though I was starved for contact, I didn’t stop to talk to any of these strangers. I had forgotten how to convincingly speak the polite things strangers say to each other.

He understood. In lovesickness we had found a common language.

It was my first lesson in the fragility of attraction.

I walked without breaks, slept through nights without waking, inhumanly smooth – a small machine.

Each year, Gracie Henderson moons a thousand strangers, collects their shocked faces in an annual photo album.

My malady was submission.The symptom: my compliance.The antidote was loud clear boundaries.

I felt unready to hold myself responsible for the decision if I slept with him

The small word, “No.” I’d see its deity.

The PCT would lead me to an otherworld, through the sadness I felt here, out of it.

When I felt strongly I would say it strongly.

I needed to stop hiding: I was raped. It was time to honestly be exactly who I was. I saw—the shame wasn't mine, it was his, and I could stop misrepresenting myself, and I could accept myself.

Childhood is a wilderness.

I was beginning to feel compassion for myself.

She told me that women who wore makeup had bad values. Putting on makeup would have been a statement—a rebellion. I didn’t try it. I grew to feel guilty for wanting to feel attractive.

Water was liquid silver, water was gold. It was clarity—a sacred thing.

After twelve years of trying, I just decided to stop missing.

Children believe they are immortal, death is an empty word like the name of a country they’ve never been to on a time-faded map. I wasn’t a child anymore.

I realized that no, no one would actually come to save or even stop me, I had absolutely no choice. The scale tipped: the moment not doing it became more difficult and unbearable than just doing it.

Because I feared I couldn't walk to Newton Centre without her, I needed to hike through desert, snow and woods alone.Childhood is a wilderness.

It was heartbreaking to realize how we can fail the people we most love without even trying.

I had no evidence. No physical signs of my rape existed anymore. My body had already purged them. That was the irreversible reality.

If I could mark clearly, convincingly and consistently what was good for me and also what was bad—if I could say yes and also no, as if it were the law—it would become my law.

I had once again proven that again alone, I was again enough.

A red leaf danced from a branch like a dropping flame, down into the calm blue lake. A gust had broken it free. There was a cold bite in the wind. It was now deep autumn in the mountains.

We aren’t afraid of what we can explain.

Beneath hot sun, desert roses bloomed. Under cold moon, I still refused to.

Water was liquid silver, water was gold. It was clarity—a sacred thing. Drinking was no longer something to take for granted. I’d never needed to consider water before.

There was so little I wanted to carry. Packing my backpack took me all of four minutes

The bravest thing I ever did was leave there. The next bravest thing I did was come back, to make myself heard.

I’d believed I needed to be steady in myself before I could function with others—but surviving alone no longer felt like a good way either.

I realized that the most empowering important thing was actually simply taking care of myself.

I was promising myself strength.I had to write it, say it, make the effort and fake it before I actually believed I could do it.

I was the director of my life, it was already true, and I would soon lead myself to my dreamed-of destinations.It was the task of my one thousand miles of solitude.

I no longer needed to peel myself of my skin, or to hide. To Dash the colorless ephemeral things that existed just beneath my surface were as vivid as the beauty marks he traced on my cheek.

The way to self-love and admiration is to behave like someone whom you love and admire.

I'd crossed a border—Speaking openly, exposing the weak girl I'd been, I was no longer her.

I didn’t know if I was brave or reckless.

I saw for the first time that I could stop giving people the power to make me feel disrespected. In my anger I began to see the absurdity of allowing this boy to shame me.

You don’t need extra food, extra water, extra clothing for extra warmth – anything extra. You don’t need soap or deodorant. Everything you carry you should need daily.

As if violence could make light. Maybe violence could make light.

The trees were friendly, they gave me rest and shadowed refuge. Slipping through them, I felt safe and competent. My whole body was occupied. I had little energy to think or worry.

But the truth was stranger than an aimless road, it always was.