What We Thought We Already Knew | Teen Ink

What We Thought We Already Knew

August 27, 2013
By Kaitia SILVER, New Canaan, Connecticut
Kaitia SILVER, New Canaan, Connecticut
5 articles 1 photo 0 comments

Favorite Quote:
“We are the people of the book. We love our books. We fill our houses with books. We treasure books we inherit from our parents, and we cherish the idea of passing those books on to our children. Indeed, how many of us started reading with a beloved book that belonged to one of our parents? We force worthy books on our friends, and we insist that they read them. We even feel a weird kinship for the people we see on buses or airplanes reading our books, the books that we claim. If anyone tries to take away our books—some oppressive government, some censor gone off the rails—we would defend them with everything that we have. We know our tribespeople when we visit their homes because every wall is lined with books. There are teetering piles of books beside the bed and on the floor; there are masses of swollen paperbacks in the bathroom. Our books are us. They are our outboard memory banks and they contain the moral, intellectual, and imaginative influences that make us the people we are today.”
― Cory Doctorow

"The heart wants what it wants. There's no logic to those things. You meet someone and you fall in love and that's that."-Woody Allen

"You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view - until you climb into his skin and walk around in it"-To Kill A Mockingbird

"We all live with the objective of being happy; our lives are all different and yet the same."-Anne Frank

"Art hurts. Art urges voyages - and it is easier to stay at home"-Gwendolyn Brooks


It was because we were allowed to convert religions and dye our own hair that we felt old
old in the sense that we were free, independent, and rightfully so we could become someone so different from who we had been the day before
the sequence of events that created an angsty period of our short lives called high school became nights spent watching lolita
or cursing loudly with passion in our eyes regarding a book about teenage suicide and the virgins who fled their Catholic parents before they tasted alcohol
We felt a temporary fix of adulthood, idolizing dead men whose synth was the soundtrack to our adolescence
we thought we knew things about people and what it meant to love
a romantic hormonal pessimist will never understand the deepest definition of love until she is there, in that moment of final admiration
otherwise said hormonal optimist teen will fall in love everyday on public transport or in the safety of her bedroom, watching strangers walk on the sidewalk, each of those people leaving her with a glimpse of a life on some faraway planet, exsisting only in the crevaces of her mind, she wrote their stories threaded together by lies
we were old because we knew that people could feel s***** and darkness comes quickly sometimes leaving you breathless or making you want to vomit or sing or preach or cry or dance or laugh half heartedly at misfortune
and when we watch men of great stature falling from great heights because of some kind of addiction
we recognize the face of repression
and the paradox of humanity
we read to escape suburbia and to find solace
we are nocturnals, insomniacs without a reason to dream because we thought we knew reality
just because you wear black doesn't mean you know life has given you the worst its got
just because you say something you heard on the news doesn't mean you know more than the common man
just because you can carve your name into a tree that will grow to be a 100 doesn't mean you will leave legends
and just because you declare yourself an original doesn't mean you have had a thought of your own
little girl, this is a cruel world and your tongue hasn't tasted ignorance
little girl you know but one thing, humans are complex creatures and those who claim to know Gods secrets
are lying, convinced themselves blind and power hungry leaches
there is no hell, little girl, I am a walking paradox
but if we learn to forgive
he who is almighty must forgive
otherwise he shall be a hypocrite like me
otherwise he would be a human
we thought we were old because we were simply alive and doing things on impulse and doing things with a few more years in our back pockets
nobody knows what we had thought we knew



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