Dead girl walking” the boys say in the halls. “Tell us your secrets” the girls whisper, one toilet to another. "I am that girl. I am the spaces between my thighs, daylight shinning through. I am the bones they want, wired on a porcelain frame.
Interpretation
This quote reflects the struggle for identity and the objectification faced by individuals, particularly women, in society.
In this poignant quote, Laurie Halse Anderson explores the depths of self-identity amidst external perceptions and societal expectations. The phrase 'dead girl walking' symbolizes the feeling of being alive yet emotionally or spiritually absent, as others scrutinize and dissect one's existence based on superficial attributes. Through her powerful imagery, Anderson emphasizes the complex relationship between self-worth and societal judgment, showcasing how external voices can shape internal realities.
In practice
This quote could be used in a discussion about body image during a women's empowerment seminar.
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 can’t 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.
A breath of steam trickles out, filled with the sobs of a grown woman breaking into girl-sized pieces.
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.
Once one concedes that a single world government is not necessary, then where does one logically stop at the permissibility of separate states? If Canada and the United States can be separate nations without being denounced as in a state of impermissible ‘anarchy’, why may not the South secede from the United States? New York State from the Union? New York City from the state? Why may not Manhattan secede? Each neighbourhood? Each block? Each house? Each person?
The only people who live in a post-black world are four people who live in a little white house on Pennsylvania Avenue. The idea that America is post-racial or post-black because a man I admire, Barack Obama, is president of the United States, is a joke. And I hope no one will even wonder about this crazy fiction again.
O, to be sure, we laugh less and play less and wear uncomfortable disguises like adults, but beneath the costume is the child we always are, whose needs are simple, whose daily life is still best described by fairy tales.
If you use your mind to study reality, you won't understand either your mind or reality. If you study reality without using your mind, you'll understand both.
There is "what is" only when there is no comparing and to live with "what is" is to be peaceful.
It would seem the people who want to preserve the Penans' way of life are condemning them to a life full of diseases and a shorter life span.
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