“We look at your eyes. The eyes carry the wounds. The eyes know damage. Damaged people recognize other damaged people, and we let you in. We are kindred. – Broken Places”
— Rachel Thompson
“Survivors create survival mechanisms. Mine is pushing through. I push everything to the side, out of my line of vision, out of my mind and I focus relentlessly on my goal. Not sure what you’d call it, but who cares? I’m a fighter and that’s enough. I live each day happy to wake up each morning to my children’s bright eyes and warm cheeks. If pushing through gives me more days with the family I’ve created, with my writing, with my loves— fine by me. Call it what you want. I call it living. -Broken Places”
— Rachel Thompson
“My world, created by glass and flame in the birth of your heat, implodes inside the shadowed walls of my heart. I swallowed the shards you gave me, your eyes on mine. Nothing is easy. I wait, feeling your hands holding the shattered pieces of my soul together in the molten, darkest recesses of the heart you claimed, unwilling to give up. I am inside you, waiting to come out.”
— Rachel Thompson
“Women have rooms inside of us men cannot fathom. It’s where we store the depths of the hurt we’ve been dealt.Where we store the deep love we never want to lose.”
— Rachel Thompson
“This is a book about fracture. About the experiences that make up a life. About the pieces of me. Delving into naked emotion is a terrifying proposition. Digging into our souls to look for answers that may not be there is a ledge most of us avoid. And yet, here I am.”
— Rachel Thompson
“She wondered If I had woken up, would I have smelled his sadness, his desperation, and his detachment? His death, her breath. He told her once, she remembers, these two words have no other rhyme but each other. If she could go back, she thinks — She would open her eyes, instead of her heart.”
— Rachel Thompson
“In a surreal gift from the universe, time both stands still and flies past you in that singular moment when you find out someone you once loved is gone.”
— Rachel Thompson
“Writers are always alone, even in a room bursting with noises of the familiar.”
— Rachel Thompson
“I gave my heart to a man who loved me, who wanted to be with me. Who ultimately was afraid of all I offered.I didn’t understand why he sabotaged our future at the time – cheating on me, again, as we were making final plans to move in together. By the time he came over to smooth talk his way out of it, I was done. No more crying. Even my tears had given up on him. I’d already moved on, his cheating was simply the key left in the mailbox.”
— Rachel Thompson
“Taking your language into my soul, feeling it separate from sentences to words burning with flight, ‘til all I have left are meaningless letters pushing fire through my veins. Words can draw blood if you’re very, very careful. – Broken Places”
— Rachel Thompson
“You used words, discarding them meaninglessly, without thinking, whereas I thought they held meaning. I found what you will never see: that my love resides on the other side of words. – Broken Places”
— Rachel Thompson
“I’ve traveled this road for many decades and I still don’t know how to go. I am a wanderer, traversing mountains of time. There is no fault, only fault lines that tremor and quake, barring me, no warning. Aftershocks. -Broken Places”
— Rachel Thompson
“Silence is one of worst, most vocal enemies, yet people go through many bouts of depression not sharing what is happening. People don’t understand that, but as someone who suffers from it, I can tell you that it’s difficult to be objective about the gray. I described depression to my therapist as a misty fog that surrounds me, heavy on my shoulders, pervading everything and nothing at all. I liken depression to a bird stealing into the depths of your soul, pecking at your disposition until nothing is left. And that is when you break into pieces.”
— Rachel Thompson