I got this book as a gift and knew nothing about the author or the book beforehand, and it was so good. I love it when you know nothing of an author or book and then can read it unbiased and with completely fresh eyes. Favourite parts ahead.
I love this line: “I have a son and two daughters, until they tell me otherwise.”
This line: “That day, I began returning to myself - when a kind woman revealed to me that being fully human is not about feeling happy, it’s about feeling everything” reminds me so much of this other paragraph that I’ll forever love.
“When a woman finally learns that pleasing the world is impossible, she becomes free to learn how to please herself.”
“I’ve seen what happens out in the world and inside our relationships when women stay numb, obedient, quiet, and small. Selfless women make for an efficient society but not a beautiful, true, or just one. When women lose themselves, the world loses its way. We do not need more selfless women. What we need right now is more women who have detoxed themselves so completely from the world’s expectations that they are full of nothing but themselves. What we need are women who are full of themselves. A woman who is full of herself knows and trusts herself enough to say and do what must be done. She lets the rest burn.”
I’m not sure if this part will have much meaning out of context, but I love it: “The Ache is not a flaw. The Ache is our meeting place. It’s the clubhouse of the brave. All the lovers are there. It is where you go alone to meet the world. The Ache is love. The Ache was never warning me: This ends, so leave. She was saying: This ends, so stay.”
“If you are uncomfortable - in deep pain, angry, yearning, confused - you don’t have a problem, you have a life. Being human is not hard because you’re doing it wrong, it’s hard because you’re doing it right. You will never change the fact that being human is hard, so you must change your idea that it was ever supposed to be easy.”
I’d never heard the term selah before and I love it. “Selah is found in the Hebrew Bible seventy-four times. Scholars believe that when it appears in the text, it is a direction to the reader to stop reading and be still for a moment, because the previous idea is important enough to consider deeply.”
Fully agree on the statement: “The woods are NOT for people.” I still don’t understand why this isn’t a universal opinion.
“We don’t control the turbulence or tragedy that happens to our families. The plot of our lives is largely out of our control. We decide only the response of the main character. We decide whether we will be the one who jumps ship or the one who stays and leads.”
“It must be so lonely to be a man. It must be so difficult to carry by yourself all the things we were meant to help each other carry.”
“Self-hatred is harder to unlearn than it is to learn. It is difficult for a woman to be healthy in a culture that is still so very sick. It is the ultimate victory for a woman to find a way to love herself and other women while existing in a world insisting that she has no right to.”
“Blessed are those brave enough to make things awkward, for they wake us up and move us forward.”
“Everything doesn’t have to be terrifying, after all. This is just life, and we are just people trying to figure each other out. Trying to figure ourselves out.”
“It is a blessing to know a free woman. Sometimes she will stop by and hold up a mirror for you. She will help you remember who you are.”
“We took wild sexuality - the mysterious undefinable ever-shifting flow between human beings - and we packaged it into sexual identities. It’s like water in a glass. Faith is water. Religion is a glass. Sexuality is water. Sexual identity is a glass. We created these glasses to try to contain uncontainable forces. Then we said to people: Pick a glass - straight or gay. So folks poured their wide, juicy selves into those narrow, arbitrary glasses because that was what was expected. Many lived lives of quiet desperation, slowly suffocating as they held their breath to fit inside.”
There isn’t a specific part that I can highlight, but the author really makes a great case for being with women. Women are just… better? In all ways?
“It’s not: I love you no matter which of my expectations you meet or don’t meet. It’s: My only expectation is that you become yourself. The more deeply I know you, the more beautiful you become to me.”
“Depression and anxiety are not feelings. Feelings return me to myself. Depression and anxiety are body snatchers that suck me out of myself so that I appear to be there but I’m really gone. Other people can still see me, but no one can feel me anymore - including me. For me, the tragedy of mental illness is not that I’m sad but that I’m not anything. Mental illness makes me miss my own life.”
“I have been conditioned to mistrust and dislike strong, confident, happy girls and women. We all have. Studies prove that the more powerful, successful, and happy a man becomes, the more people trust and like him. But the more powerful and happy a woman becomes, the less people like and trust her. We become people who say of confident women, “I don’t know, I can’t explain it - it’s just something about her. I just don’t like her. I can’t put my finger on why.” I can put my finger on why: It’s because our training is kicking in through our subconscious. Strong, happy, confident girls and women are breaking our culture’s implicit rule that girls should be self-doubting, reserved, timid, and apologetic. Girls who are bold enough to break those rules irk us. Their brazen defiance and refusal to follow directions make us want to put them back into their cage. Girls and women sense this. We want to be liked. We want to be trusted. So we downplay our strengths to avoid threatening anyone and invoking disdain. We do not mention our accomplishments. We temper, qualify, and discount our opinions. We walk without swagger, and we yield incessantly. We step out of the way. We say, “I feel like” instead of “I know.” We ask if our ideas make sense instead of assuming they do. We apologize for… everything. Conversations among brilliant women often devolve into competitions for who wins the trophy for hottest mess. We want to be respected, but we want to be loved and accepted even more.”
“Playing dumb, weak, and silly is a disservice to yourself and to the world. Every time you pretend to be less than you are, you steal permission from other women to exist fully. Don’t mistake modesty for humility. Modesty is a giggly lie. An act. A mask. A fake game. We have no time for it.”
“When I see a joyful, confident woman moving through the world with swagger, I’m going to forgive myself for my first reaction because it’s not my fault, it’s just my conditioning. First reaction: Who the hell does she think she is? Second reaction: She knows she’s a goddamn cheetah. Halle-fucking-lujah.”
And my most favourite few lines of the entire book: “If women trusted and claimed their desires, the world as we know it would crumble. Perhaps that is precisely what needs to happen so we can rebuild truer, more beautiful lives, relationships, families, and nations in their place. Maybe Eve was never meant to be our warning. Maybe she was meant to be our model. Own your wanting. Eat the apple. Let it burn.”
Oh and one last part. It’s perfect.
Honestly, it was such a good book. Everyone should read it.
(Thank you, Marla, for introducing me to it!)