And it’s about the simple pleasures that keep getting you out of bed every morning. Toast with butter or jam or cream cheese and cucumbers. Simple little things that you know will be there when you wake up. Blankets. Sunlight on Puget Sound. Dew on cedars. Daisies. Somewhere, mountains. Somewhere, the ocean. The consistent things, the old things, like evergreen trees at dusk. – Rachel Corrie: Let Me Stand Alone.
And that’s what it’s all about, really, looking out a window at all the things you can imagine, and being a little terrified, but still looking and planning and staking out a path. – Rachel Corrie: Let Me Stand Alone
As I walk out the door, my reflection flutters up again on its glass surface. Now it wavers. What I mistook for a pear an hour before is only a faltering wraith. The gleaming eyes and jutting cheekbones are all that is left. I want to observe this shadowy parody of me longer: it fascinates me. Drenched in darkness, my face has taken on an enigmatic quality. It is almost beautiful. This reflected ghost does not surprise me; I have seen her before. She gazes down at me from the car window late at night, broken by the harsh glow of an occasional street light. This part of me, a half-hidden, mysterious fairy, is the part I can love. She is completely mine. She is mature and wise and feminine. – Rachel Corrie: Let Me Stand Alone
In the second grade there were classroom rules hanging from the ceiling. The only one I can remember now seems like it would be a good rule for life. “Everyone must feel safe.” Safe to be themselves, physically safe, safe to say what they think, just safe. That’s the best rule I can think of. – Rachel Corrie: Let Me Stand Alone
We should be inspired by people… who show that human beings can be kind, brave, generous, beautiful, strong-even in the most difficult circumstances. – Rachel Corrie
When I ride in the dark on stark roads through dry, bald hills, I ache with desperate longing. I don’t know what I am longing for, maybe for some place of my own within these images, some place where I fit, instead of being the one human being still awake, the only thing moving across the hills in arid darkness. Maybe that ache is loneliness. I haven’t found a name for the feeling yet, nor do I know exactly what awakens it in me. But instinct warns me that it is too potent for me, that my soul is on the verge of cracking when I feel it that way. I cannot handle the sheer power of those wild emotions by myself. I have to find some way to share them. That is why I write. It’s instinctive. I just have to – because it is awake like lava in my blood, and sustains me.
Rachel Corrie; Let Me Stand Alone – The Journals of Rachel Corrie