Maria Dahvana Headley Quotes & Sayings

I just feel like this skin is mine. It's aging every day and the tattoos are aging with me. So, I'm going to be an old piece of paper one day with a lot of work on it. — Maria Dahvana Headley

I know everyone has dreams of flying, but this isn't a dream of flying. It's a dream of floating, and the ocean is not water but wind.
I call it a dream, but it feels realer than my life. — Maria Dahvana Headley

My thing is a Mystery and not just a Mystery, but Bermuda
no sun, only Triangle. Unknowable. Unsolvable. — Maria Dahvana Headley

The Playwright was excited in the way a child is excited on Christmas morning. I liked this. Most people didn't get excited about anything other than their own discontent. — Maria Dahvana Headley

Some days I'm just sixteen, and sixteen isn't what I want to be. — Maria Dahvana Headley

I think about curses and pirates. Skeletons guarding booby-trapped hideaways. — Maria Dahvana Headley

The main problem of living in the city that never sleeps that neither did I. — Maria Dahvana Headley

I need to get onto Aza's ship. I know where it's going. I think I know, even though all I really know, all I've really known since I was five, is that Aza is my universe. — Maria Dahvana Headley

I'm this thing that emerged from it, some kind of miserable Phoenix. — Maria Dahvana Headley

It felt like she took off running without me. Her fingers clenched in on mine. Then relaxed, like she'd lost all her bones. — Maria Dahvana Headley

A hilarious, honest, heartfelt look at what it means to take on a family that isn't your own ... Izzy Rose rocks it. — Maria Dahvana Headley

Looping. Some days are so dark I can't see anything but a miserable fog of number after number, word after word, clouds of verbs and nouns and none of them the ones that will make time go backward. — Maria Dahvana Headley

I don't think of the sky as any kind of heaven item. I think of it as a bunch of gases and faraway echoes of things that used to be on fire. — Maria Dahvana Headley

Life and death aren't as different from each other as I thought they were. This isn't like walking into a new country. This is like walking into a new room in the same house. This is like sharing a hallway and the same row of framed family pictures, but there's a glass wall between. — Maria Dahvana Headley

I'm dark matter. The universe inside of me is full of something, and science can't even shine a light on it. I feel like I'm mostly made of mysteries. — Maria Dahvana Headley

We are made of awkward. — Maria Dahvana Headley

You are strong enough to sing as you wish, not as your pain has forced to. You aren't your hurt. You're other than that. You are not the broken things you've been. — Maria Dahvana Headley

I like monsters in general - that's what I like to write about. Somebody was joking with me that my body was becoming a manual for a role-playing game because I'm covered in little monsters. That's true. I could easily have more monsters on my skin. — Maria Dahvana Headley

Death is the Santa Claus of the adult world. Except Santa Claus in reverse. The guy who takes all the presents away. — Maria Dahvana Headley

The sound coming out of me is nothing like a cough, nothing even in the same category of a song, but some kind of bird of prey roar, shredding my throat, pulsating my fingers, and Milekt beneath it, singing inside my voice, amplifying me, and making me stronger. — Maria Dahvana Headley

Even people who've never seen a miracle can believe in miracles. — Maria Dahvana Headley

Brooke Berman's voice is utterly distinct, and her book, detailing her nomadic artist's journey toward both a successful playwriting career and a home of her own, through 20 years of cramped sublets, high-rise palaces, writer's colonies, and boyfriend's vans, is a hilarious, hopeful, and penetrating must-read. — Maria Dahvana Headley

Carpe omnia," I say. Not carpe diem. Not Seize the Day. No, this says Seize Everything. I'll — Maria Dahvana Headley

Maybe we're brokenhearted, but why isn't it rational to have a broken heart? It is utter shit out there, the things you can't control. The world is full of wrongs, and mess and distress and horror. Who can really be blamed for wanting to dig their way down and live in a hole, or disappear into a cave and never be around humans again? If all people do is hurt each other? — Maria Dahvana Headley

I was becoming convinced that I was going to be lonely for the rest of my life. It wasn't that I wasn't meeting men. I was. It was just that they all drove me crazy. — Maria Dahvana Headley

Fate is never fair. This is why there is such a thing as magic. — Maria Dahvana Headley

I think of the note.

I want to say me too.

I want to say I know.

I want to say I can read the gaps in your sentences. I can read the space between your letters. I know your language. It's my language too.

I want to say that. — Maria Dahvana Headley

People, alas, don't document things with any kind of precision. They fill Twitter with blurry photos. — Maria Dahvana Headley

You hold no horrors for me — Maria Dahvana Headley

Some people think it's comforting to imagine being flung over a rainbow when you die, grabbed by your ankles by a bluebird, and swung into the void. — Maria Dahvana Headley

Maybe love is just that, and only that. The choice you make. And so, you choose to love. You choose to give it all up, to surrender your scared self and live in this mystery. Jik — Maria Dahvana Headley

My first tattoo is a full-on Sailor Jerry situation on my hip - it's a swallow with big spread wings. When I got it I was 20 on St. Mark's Place in New York; I just walked in in a frenzy. It's still there 17 years later and it's not a terrible thing to look at. — Maria Dahvana Headley

I was a protestor. I was such a protestor that I regularly protested things that might have been good for me. — Maria Dahvana Headley

And there's the loudest sound I've ever heard and the brightest white I've ever seen, and I'm made of it, I'm-
I'm made of light
I'm made of heat
And I'm flying — Maria Dahvana Headley

Vertigo, that's where I am. Pi wants to take over, but I don't let it. Looping wants to occur, but I remain sentient, and I don't do any of the various forms of out-freaking I want to do. — Maria Dahvana Headley

Nothing like trouble to make a day pass faster. — Maria Dahvana Headley

I {} you more than [[[{{{}}}]]]. — Maria Dahvana Headley

I think about celestial junk. Like, maybe every planet in this solar system is discarded by giant hands. Each star a crumpled ball of paper, a love letter lit on fire, a smoldering bit of cigarette ash. — Maria Dahvana Headley

There's more than one path to immortality. — Maria Dahvana Headley

For years, I thought that if I had to be a palindrome, make me kuulilennuteetunneliluuk. — Maria Dahvana Headley

I like the sky. It's rational to me in a way that life isn't. — Maria Dahvana Headley

I read stuff. Books are not my only friends, but we're friendly. So there. — Maria Dahvana Headley

Living's a risk, Aza," she says sharply. "Heroes die young. Would you choose to be less than a hero? Here, the sky will light with fire for you. Our funerals are their sunsets. — Maria Dahvana Headley

Did he just say stormsharks? My inner nerd is elated. Can anything I will ever hear from now until the end of time sound cooler than stormsharks? — Maria Dahvana Headley

I can't imagine a universe in which I try to unlove her. — Maria Dahvana Headley

I have long been aggravated, and it increases, about the way that society values women almost exclusively for their beauty and youth, and when we get older, tries to make us powerless - just when we're at our most knowledgeable, and most capable. It's so rotten. I gnash my teeth. — Maria Dahvana Headley

I frantically opened my address book and searched it for someone, anyone, who'd moved me, who'd been good in both bed and brain. No. A slew of the so-so. — Maria Dahvana Headley

But there was no version of my life in which I wasn't getting my ass to Svalbard. — Maria Dahvana Headley

Adults want to talk about death way less than people my age do. Death is the Santa Claus of the adult world. Except Santa Claus in reverse. The guy who takes all the presents away. Big bag over the shoulder, climbing up the chimney carrying everything in a person's life, and taking off, eight-reindeered, from the roof. — Maria Dahvana Headley

If you look at the sky that way, it's this massive shifting poem, or maybe a letter, first written by one author, and then, when the earth moves, annotated by another. So I stare and stare until, one day, I can read it. — Maria Dahvana Headley

I feel my strange, beautiful bird in my heart, and the unflooded world all around me. — Maria Dahvana Headley

Instead of the smoldering, soul-baring, Abelard-to-Heloise-sans-castration solicitations you rightfully deserve, you're getting stupefying lines like: I'm listening to NPR. Do you want to come over and make out? — Maria Dahvana Headley

Books are not my only friends, but we're friendly. — Maria Dahvana Headley

I can hear my mom.
I can hear her take a deep breath. I hear her pushing words out, and I can almost see her, for a second, the look on her face, her hand pressed to her own heart, the other in a fist.
"You can go if you have to go," my mom says, and her voice shakes, but she's solid. She says it again, so I'll know. "You can go if you have to go, okay, baby? Don't wait for me. I love you, you're mine, you'll always be mine, and this is going to be okay, you're safe, baby, you're safe-"
... And after that? There's nothing. — Maria Dahvana Headley

I'm a hoax, a dying boy who's grown wings. — Maria Dahvana Headley

You've never seen surprise until you've looked into the eyes of an ascending bovine. — Maria Dahvana Headley

Because every time someone finds a new animal, or a new amazing thing on earth, it means we haven't broken everything yet. — Maria Dahvana Headley

Side note: invalid. Whoever invented that word, and made it the same word as not-valid? That person sucked. — Maria Dahvana Headley