Shelley Jackson Quotes & Sayings

It is a terrible thing when it is the substitute that is sent to find a new life, a sign that a person yearns for change but cannot imagine creating it herself....
If scapegoats feel pain, it is only the delegated pain of their originals. — Shelley Jackson

I began to invent something new: a way to hang together without pretending I was whole — Shelley Jackson

Not that pain is the worst thing in the universe. Interesting things happen when you adapt pain for your own. This thing you were prepared to spend your life flinching from is suddenly just another piece of information. — Shelley Jackson

Feathers needed, swan preferred. — Shelley Jackson

Scar tissue does more than flaunt its strength by chronicling the assaults it has withstood. Scar tissue is new growth. And it is tougher than skin innocent of the blade. — Shelley Jackson

Still, I know how to use the little I have, my flat stomach and rather flatter chest, my slightly bowed, but strong and flexible legs. I produce plenty of phlegm. I have clever hands and a stare that could take the silvering off a mirror. Men flatter themselves they are original in admiring me. How confused they are when they find out they have competition. (There is no desperation like that of a lover who has decided to do you a favor, and finds himself waiting in line.) — Shelley Jackson

I patch together a living language out of reanimated parts, like Frankenstein, and feel no disgust at scrabbling in the charnel house. Each of us makes her own monster, who earns a cozy co-tenancy of our tomb. We're all the last native speakers of a language that dies with us. Am I so special for tasting the rot on my tongue? For knowing whose remains I'm kitted out in? — Shelley Jackson