Caroline Kettlewell Quotes

“You might imagine that a person would resort to self-mutilation only under extremes of duress, but once I'd crossed that line the first time, taken that fateful step off the precipice, then almost any reason was a good enough reason, almost any provocation was provocation enough. Cutting was my all-purpose solution.”

— Caroline Kettlewell

“The fear of an unknown never resolves, because the unknown expands infinitely outward, leaving you to cling pitifully to any small shelter of the known: a cracker has twelve calories; the skin, when cut, bleeds.”

— Caroline Kettlewell

For some reason, I believed that I had above all else an obligation to protect everyone
my teachers, my family
from the knowledge of my cutting. What they did not know would not cause them pain.

— Caroline Kettlewell

I needed cutting now the way a diabetic needs insulin. It was a bulwark, steady and unyielding, I could throw up against the insidious, corrosive lapping of a whispering sea of uneasiness.

— Caroline Kettlewell

Anorexia isn't about being fat, it's about having fat.

— Caroline Kettlewell

Well how many troubles should equal a legitimate reason for self-mutilation? Ten? Twenty? One hundred? And how monumental must these troubles be? There's probably no critical mass beyond which cutting yourself would ever seem to most people like a reasonable choice. I cut because it did look that way to me. I cut because something had to give. I cut because the alternatives were worse.

— Caroline Kettlewell

“That's when I wanted to cut. I cut to quiet the cacophony. I cut to end this abstracted agony, to reel my selves back to one present and physical whole, whose blood was the proof of her tangibility.”

— Caroline Kettlewell

“The chaos in my head spun itself into a silk of silence. I had distilled myself to the immediacy of hand, blade, blood, flesh.”

— Caroline Kettlewell

“Once you take to the habit of deception, every new lie comes that much easier. Though to me it wasn't so much lies as a matter of judicious editing. We all inevitable present a version of ourselves that is a collection of half-truths and exclusions. The way I saw it, the truth was too complicated, whereas the well-chosen lie would put everyone's mind at ease.”

— Caroline Kettlewell

“I have drawn the line, and I am still on this side of it.”

— Caroline Kettlewell

“My unhappiness precluded all else; unhappiness is a kind of narcissism, in which nothing that does not resonate with your unhappiness can interest you.”

— Caroline Kettlewell

“In the end, if we could ever really pursue the question 'why' to its true headwaters, we might find it is often no more than this: a beginning so trifling that it hardly bears notice. The flip of a switch. The flash of a neurotransmission. Maybe there was always something amiss, like a bulb planted and forgotten that blooms when the season is right.
... A thousand girls could have gotten through my seventh grade and breezed on with a laugh; I didn't.”

— Caroline Kettlewell

Why can't I remember our family Christmas, or a warm spring day, or anything that might have been pleasant? It is as though the filter of recall is itself altered, so that it blocks out everything but the darkest colors of the spectrum.

— Caroline Kettlewell

“How gratifying it is to amuse. How easy it gets to toss off a witticism to ease any awkwardness, to sidestep any solemnity. When you amuse, it even seems, for the briefest possible moment that you are who you appear to be, so clever and confident and at ease.”

— Caroline Kettlewell