Michelle Dallocchio Quotes

“Often I would hear other people ask, “When will I be normal again?”What you don’t often hear is a blunt truth: things will never be normal again. Not the “old" normal at least. You have to invent the new normal.I knew that I needed to take an honest appraisal of my life. Were my problems really bigger than me? Of course not. That’s why I remained in constant motion. Resistance to life’s changes meant death. No matter how depressing and bleak my past looked, I knew that I needed to keep moving and adapting in order to survive.”

“Fine art is the discipline of breaking rules.”

“Someone can tell you all your life that you’re inferior, but it doesn’t matter until you accept it and allow for validation. Once validation takes place, it’s then that the colonial malaise sets in like smallpox.”

“Stigma's power lies in silence. The silence that persists when discussion and action should be taking place. The silence one imposes on another for speaking up on a taboo subject, branding them with a label until they are rendered mute or preferably unheard.”

“Indifference is the worst kind of response when love is expressed. Hate is not the antithesis of love; it’s the nonexistence of feeling, a pervasive apathy. When hate is present, so is love. It’s passion gone sour and fueled by pain, but, nonetheless, it’s passion and love is apparently still alive. Yet when indifference seeps into our spirits, an emotional numbness and permitted scotoma takes the place of any passion – whether it’s love or hate – and resigns in a new state of being.”

“Get acquainted with your shadow, or find yourself surprised when a crisis emerges.”

“How often do the poor in the US get to stand in front of their nation's Marie Antoinette's and shove the stale, mass-produced cake of lower class reality back into their mouths?”

“With even the slightest upset, detachment soon followed. I didn’t lose sleep over men, and I was too restless to be tied down. The grass didn’t even have time to grow around my feet before I was planning my next escape – whether it was to another state or out of someone’s life.”

“It is not enough to hope for something to happen and throw it into the universe. You, too, must also work to make it happen.”

“Home.” This was my mantra, my four-letter savior.”