If you love yourself the most at your happiest moments, there is no reason not to be fond of who you are in the dark.

— Ashly Lorenzana

If you manage to live long enough, most of your greatest fears become fond memories to look back on.

— Ashly Lorenzana

If you're going to do something, strive to do it better than anyone else. Do it all the way. If you're going to half-ass it, why bother?

— Ashly Lorenzana

If you're not scared of the dark, it hasn't been dark enough.

— Ashly Lorenzana

I have been known to think outside all rules. Even my own.

— Ashly Lorenzana

I know that my grandmother certainly did nothing to warrant my mother stealing all of her jewelry that my grandfather had given her as gifts over the years, just so she could peddle it for heroin on the street. Those were precious metals and gems that could never be replaced, and each one had a story behind it. A love story between my grandparents, that my mother flushed down a proverbial toilet so that she could shoot up, throw up and pass out.

— Ashly Lorenzana

I'm falling apart, one part after another. Falling down on the world like snow. Half of me is already on the ground, watching from below.

— Ashly Lorenzana

I'm not crying out for help, but I am sharing my experience in the hopes that readers will get something out of it. I'm not the one who gets to decide what that is, if anything. Furthermore, I'm just starting the "journey" if you will, so I can't possibly know yet what the "message" of my life really is. Furthermore, I only know what has happened so far, and how I've felt up until this moment. Furthermore, I agree that reading about the pain of others is concerning when they are still hurting and in the same situation as when they wrote about it. But what can you do? You can reach out, ask how you can help and be there to listen. You can't save someone who doesn't want to be saved. Furthermore, you can't love someone who doesn't love themselves enough to take care of themselves and stay out of bad situations. Believe me, I know this.

— Ashly Lorenzana

I'm pretty lost in becoming all this frost. Bitter, like Winter. Strung-out like a string of pearls.

— Ashly Lorenzana

In some ways, forcing me to leave was the best thing that could have happened to me. In other ways, it was a disaster. I'm still glad they did it though, because I think I might have just died if I had stayed at the coast. Although I ended up there a couple of years later, when my mother relapsed on a whim, I think I needed that two years away from that horrible little coastal town where time is frozen and ideas creep forward too slow to notice any progress.

— Ashly Lorenzana