Frida Kahlo's real words are fewer and plainer than the posters suggest. The ones that can be traced sit in the diary she kept from 1944 to 1954: a line about wings written in 1953, a farewell from her last pages, and a bitter joke about the two accidents of her life.
She filled that diary with drawings and short entries, and it is the closest thing to a private voice that she left behind.
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One of the most widely shared lines in her name is not in the diary at all. It begins, "I used to think I was the strangest person in the world," and it travels the internet as if she had written it in one of her notebooks. She did not.
It first appeared in March 2008 as an anonymous postcard on PostSecret, the blog where strangers mail in their secrets. The card was a collage: part of a magazine picture of Kahlo, with the text typed over it. According to Quote Investigator, that portrait most likely prompted the later misattribution.
A second famous passage reached her name by a different route, and it was written by a young Mexican poet, not by Kahlo. Between those two borrowed texts and the few sentences that really are hers, the clearest of the real ones sits on a diary page from 1953, where she drew a pair of feet.
Where did the wings line come from?
From her private diary, on a page dated 1953…
What You'll Discover
Her last words in the diary.
What she called her two accidents.
Who wrote her most shared line.
Whose poem got her name.