Ashe Vernon Quotes & Sayings

This is the story of how I never stopped running. This is the story of how,
when the wolves knocked, I met them at the door and I became the beast, instead. — Ashe Vernon

What they don't tell you
about standing up for what you believe in
is that your feet will bruise
and your legs will ache. — Ashe Vernon

I was a wolf, and they dressed me
in sheepskin — Ashe Vernon

But who buries the hatchet
and who buries the bodies?
And who says they're not
the same thing these days? — Ashe Vernon

I am carving myself into a shape
that no one will recognize
because it is better being the marble
than the monster. — Ashe Vernon

don't you dare, for one minute,
believe that my kindness makes me
anything but insurmountable.
i did not unzip my chest to every kind of hurt,
and stagger back, wounded and alive,
just to hear you call me weak for trying.
i opened my door to heartache -
i gave her the fucking key.
my softness for wayward strangers
has made me nothing less
than a halfway house for aching soles.
so when you open your mouth
and call me 'baby'
understand that i am not your next victim
in a laundry list of broken girls.
you think i don't know you? people like you?
people with mouths for hands.
i've got skin like topsoil
and your teeth could never take root.
so when you go looking to make a plaything
of a sunburst,
you better look for someone with less fire
than me.
because softness or no,
i will eat you alive
before i let you make a meal of me. — Ashe Vernon

Trouble is, I love better at a distance... — Ashe Vernon

You are a language I am no longer fluent in
but still remember how to read. — Ashe Vernon

Your ribcage never meant to hurt you.
Your windpipe doesn't know how to be pretty,
but she knows how to howl -
and here, I'd like to take a moment
to submit a formal apology to my soft parts
because they kept me warm
when I was trying to freeze to death,
and I hated them for it. An apology
for a starvation that went deeper than my skin.
One for the strongest skeleton I will ever own
and how I kept using the word girl against it.
Or how I turned words like beautiful into shapes
I could contort myself into. I didn't mean
to compare myself to faces I can't have.
Or spend years trying to carve myself,
like Michelangelo's angels, from the marble -
forgetting what it is to be skin instead of stone.
I let myself be afraid. I was taught to be.
When you learn you are only as good
as your beauty routine, you forget
how to define yourself by anything else. — Ashe Vernon

What they don't tell you about the illusion
is that I am as much lion as I am lion tamer.
And I got good at inflicting pain the same way I got good
at soothing it.
This, we call unfortunate,
but inevitable. — Ashe Vernon

There are poets who sing you to sleep
and poets who ready you for war
and I want to be both. — Ashe Vernon