A breath of steam trickles out, filled with the sobs of a grown woman breaking into girl-sized pieces.
Interpretation
This quote illustrates the emotional breakdown of a woman who feels fragmented and vulnerable.
In this quote, Laurie Halse Anderson captures a poignant moment of emotional turmoil, depicting a grown woman who experiences profound sadness and vulnerability. The imagery of 'a breath of steam' coupled with 'sobs' and 'breaking into girl-sized pieces' conveys the idea that despite her adult exterior, deep within her lies a fragile, childlike aspect, highlighting the complexity of human emotions and the struggles that persist from childhood into adulthood.
In practice
This quote can be shared during a mental health awareness event to highlight the importance of addressing emotional struggles.
Memory cuts both ways; it can either provide you with tremendous strength and a foundation to carry you through your life, or it can be a demon that just ruins your present and your future because you canβt let go of the past.
Here stands a girl clutching a knife. There is grease on the stove, blood in the air, and angry words piled in the corners. We are trained not to see it, not to see any of it. . . . Someone just ripped off my eyelids.
This girl shivers and crawls under the covers with all her clothes on and falls into an overdue library book, a faerie story with rats and marrow and burning curses. The sentences build a fence around her, a Times Roman 10-point barricade, to keep the thorny voices in her head from getting too close.
I open a paperclip and scratch it across the inside of my left wrist. Pitiful. If a suicide attempt is a cry for help, then what is this. A whimper, a peep? I draw little window cracks of blood, etching line after line until it stops hurting.
If I can write a book that will help the world make a little more sense to a teen, then that's why I was put on the planet.
Write about the emotions you fear the most.
As soon as a man recognizes that he has drifted into age, he gets reminiscent. He wants to talk and talk; and not about the present or the future, but about his old times. For there is where the pathos of his life lies - and the charm of it. The pathos of it is there because it was opulent with treasures that are gone, and the charm of it is in casting them up from the musty ledgers and remembering how rich and gracious they were.
I'll die young, but it's like kissing God.
When I was maybe 5 or 6 years old, the neighborhood girls would sit on the stoop and sing. I was known as the kid who had a good voice and no father.
As a child there's a horror in discovering the limitations of the ones you love. The time you find that your mother cannot keep you safe, that your tutor makes a mistake, that the wrong path must be taken because the grown-ups lack the strength to take the right one...each of those moments is the theft of your childhood, each of them a blow that kills some part of the child you were, leaving another part of the man exposed, a new creature, tougher but tempered with bitterness and disappointment.
He trudged along unknowing what he sought, And whistled as he went, for want of thought.
You're getting to be a big boy,' I said desperately, 'it's time you started thinking about your future.' 'I'm thinking about my future,' said Sonny, grimly. 'I think about it all the time.
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