Kayla Rae Whitaker Quotes & Sayings

You know, the voiceover continues, it would be nice if we were defined, ultimately, by the people and places we loved. Good things. But at the end of the day, there's the reality that we're not. Does the good stuff really have the weight that the weird stuff does? What makes the deeper impact - all the ridges and gathers - on who we are? Do we have a choice? — Kayla Rae Whitaker

Your life is the people who fill it," Mel says. "And nothing's good without them. — Kayla Rae Whitaker

Art is too often discounted as a secondary priority. The writer is necessary to society. — Kayla Rae Whitaker

I spent years trying to outrun myself, Mel says. Trying to make enough noise to drown myself out. It makes me ashamed to admit this. But it's okay to let yourself catch up. It's okay if you work to catch up to the things that have happened to you. You do it for yourself. But also for the people around you. The people who deserve to experience you, undiluted, honest. Your genuine self, given to them. — Kayla Rae Whitaker

Children learn it. Boys, but more often, and more closely, girls. When girls learn it, they learn it for the rest of their lives, inventing two separate planes on which they exist--the life of the surface, presented for others, and the life forever lived on the inside, the one that owns you. — Kayla Rae Whitaker

We sank into a cozy little vacuum, Mel and I, watching. I don't know if it was the cartoons themselves, or watching them with Mel, but that night was the closest I had felt to knowing what I wanted from my life. She was the first person to see me as I had always wanted to be seen. It was enough to indebt me to her forever. — Kayla Rae Whitaker

This is what working in what amounts to a rat's nest for the past decade has done to us, I think, looking at our reflections in the mirror. Ten years in a piece-of-crap studio in the armpit of Bushwick with full view-and-sound of the JMZ train, giving ourselves humpbacks craning over our drafting tables, Camels drooping from our mouths, passing expired packages of Peeps back and forth in the dark. The work has made me forget how to act like a person. We're not fit to go out and socialize with the fancy people, all Cheetos-stained hands and dilated pupils. — Kayla Rae Whitaker