Lisa Taddeo Quotes

There is no humanity in humans.

He's usually so quiet, but he's talking now, and when quiet people open their mouths the whole world listens.

Later she will text him, Thank you for taking the time, for spending so much time with me today.

If you ask her how long it was she will say, Gee, I'd say it was almost thirty minutes.

It's more than fandom when a story touches you so hard that you wish the characters were your family

Sleep is not sweet but dumb. It is a gap in time, a gap in pain.

The way the wind blows in our country can make us question who we are in our own lives. Often the type of waiting women do is to make sure other women approve, so that they may also approve of themselves.

We pretend to want things we don't want so nobody can see us not getting what we need.

What the fuck do you know about young women, Maggie thinks. We don't remember what we want to remember. We remember what we can't forget.

Her whole life stretches out before her, a path of imprecise but multiple directions. She could be an astronaut, a rap star, an accountant. She could be happy.

She is at that precipice, possessing, still, the dreams of a child, but now able to press them up against the potential of an adult.

So you can judge me for being with Aiden , you can all judge me. But I found something to take the pain away and until you have felt my pain, you shouldn't judge me. Women shouldn't judge one another's lives, if we haven't been through one another's fires.

There should be a stronger word than regret.

Sometimes there's nothing better on earth than someone asking you a question.

When you're young you can do almost anything and it won't be sad.

In the middle of this tenderness she shivers because she knows the truth even as she tries to shut it out: he is terrible to her. It's not that he is outwardly cruel but that he almost never considers her heart. He lives his life, full of swing sets and barrier planks and responsibilities to his wife. Lina is a bobcat in the woods; as it cries you feel sad in the moment but later on you sit down to dinner, you hold a child, you pick a piece of gristle out of your teeth. You watch a game. You forget to reply to a text. You fall asleep.

It's the nuances of desire that hold the truth of who we are at our rawest moments. I set out to register the heat and sting of female want so that men and other women might more easily comprehend before they condemn. Because it's the quotidian moments of our lives that will go on forever, that will tell us who we were, who our neighbors and our mothers were, when we were too diligent in thinking they were nothing like us. This is the story of three women.

Look at me. I put this war paint on, but underneath I'm scarred and scared and horny and tired and love you.

The rumours, as usual, didn't take into account the complexity, much less the truth.

The problem, she's starting to understand, is that a man will never let you fall completely into hell. He will scoop you up right before you drop the final inch so that you cannot blame him for sending you there. He keeps you in a dinerlike purgatory instead, waiting and hoping and taking orders.

Maggie is not even somebody that somebody hates. She is a nobody that nobody knows.

It's like an ex telling you he is "talking" to someone new: you are aware that he means he has not slept with the new person, but if you are wise, you know the talking is deeper. Talking means there is going to be a relationship.

It's the quotidian minutes of our lives that will go on forever, that will tell us who we were.

Throughout history, men have broken women's hearts in a particular way. They love them or half-love them and then grow weary and spend weeks and months extricating themselves soundlessly, pulling their tails back into their doorways, drying themselves off, and never calling again. Meanwhile, women wait. The more in love they are and the fewer options they have, the longer they wait, hoping that he will return with a smashed phone, with a smashed face, and say, I'm sorry, I was buried alive and the only thing I thought of was you, and feared that you would think I'd forsaken you when the truth is only that I lost your number, it was stolen from me by the men who buried me alive, and I've spent three years looking in phone books and now I have found you. I didn't disappear, everything I felt didn't just leave. You were right to know that would be cruel, unconscionable, impossible. Marry me.

She's never understood exactly what it means to seethe until tonight. She's never understood that pain can so easily feel like the most crippling anger.