Megan Giddings > Quotes

“I think men can be absolutely useless and a lot of people will find a way to say something nice about them. Especially white men. But a woman has to be something. If she’s not, you know, considered hot or the right amount of smart or good at cooking, people don’t see her. And if she’s too much of something, then many people hate her.”
― Megan Giddings, Lakewood

“Anything can make sense to a person as long as it helps them feel powerful.”
― Megan Giddings, The Women Could Fly

“I know this is weird, but sometimes when you’re older, the worst place in the world might be your own brain.”
― Megan Giddings, The Women Could Fly

“Sometimes, I thought my ability to joke about anything, anytime, anywhere was proof something was fundamentally wrong with me. Sometimes, I wondered if it was the only thing keeping me alive.”
― Megan Giddings, The Women Could Fly

“Sometimes, dreams are not omens. They’re just your brain stitching things together.”
― Megan Giddings, Lakewood

“But I also kept thinking of every man I had ever known. The ones from high school who were now in jail or had DUIs or posted pictures on social media of their assault rifles. The men I would see at campus parties where at least two women would discreetly point to them and say, “Watch your drink when he’s around.” The men who would walk too close behind me when I was going home alone at night, who made me grip my keys in my hand, made me reach in my purse and pretend I had a canister of pepper spray in my palm. None of them had to sacrifice their privacy like this. I”
― Megan Giddings, The Women Could Fly

“It’s a truth all people should know but they spend most of their lives working actively to forget: there is no power without the potential for harm.”
― Megan Giddings, The Women Could Fly

“What was it like to be loved in a way that felt immutable? To not be told I was loved, but to feel it, to see it most of the time?”
― Megan Giddings, The Women Could Fly

“I wanted to be someone who didn’t flinch when the subject of me came up. There were so many things I could’ve told her about myself, about why I was the way I am, but I wanted Linden to like me. I chose silence.”
― Megan Giddings, The Women Could Fly

“We brainstormed more as we walked. At one point, Linden paused and wrote into her notebook. She kept saying, “This is so ambitious,” in a way I knew meant her brain was whirring. Few things made me feel happier to be alive than having an idea, telling it to a friend I respected, and having them instantly take it seriously. The more things we said to each other, the bigger and more tangible the path became in my imagination. It would also be beautiful.”
― Megan Giddings, The Women Could Fly

“I reminded myself that throughout history women had endured far worse things. I had the internet, a job, access to pizza, money, no kids; no one had tried to burn me at the stake yet;”
― Megan Giddings, The Women Could Fly

“Why was it so much easier to think about people than be with them?”
― Megan Giddings, The Women Could Fly

“I am a thousand percent sure there are plenty of white women who think America is great to them. But America is only routinely good to women, especially black women, when it wants something from them.”
― Megan Giddings, Lakewood

“But her grandmother had surprised her. She had spoken about saving yourself, not for marriage- although that would be great and really what Jesus preferred- but for someone who respected your body as much as you did. Her grandmother had said it was better to love your body as much as possible before letting someone else have access to it. That they could permanently damage in unexpected ways how you saw yourself.”
― Megan Giddings, Lakewood

“That path was filled with the thorns and snakes and loose gravel of life’s deep unfairness.”
― Megan Giddings, Lakewood

“People feel more loyalty to how they think things should be than to other people, including their family.”
― Megan Giddings, Lakewood

“All those people deserved rashes. I felt sure in those moments if I had the ability to point at them and make them itch for an hour, I would be a much happier person.”
― Megan Giddings, The Women Could Fly

“I still get angry thinking about the desecration of those bodies, but there's also something hilarious to me about being so rich that you can arrange to have a body stolen and cremated, to be so completely stupid-desperate that you think this corpse powder can fix all your problems.”
― Megan Giddings, The Women Could Fly

“I decided that I will go there every day. Drink from the same fountain I remember my grandmother's hands lifting me up toward. Have a cup of coffee in the coffeeshop and watch the water spill up and out of the fountain. I will look at the brushstrokes, the sculptures gleaming under the light like well-tempered chocolates, the golden frames, black and white images of the long dead. I will force myself to remember, despite everything I know now, people are capable of making something wonderful.”
― Megan Giddings, Lakewood

“If you think too much about how things should be, you forget how they are”
― Megan Giddings, Lakewood

“I told her how we had thought social media were going to be these great places where everyone could connect, where we could learn things and share all our little comments about TV shows without annoying the people watching with us, where there were no limits to the possibilities of language. Then, it became mostly like almost everything else that people touched. White, thin, conventionally attractive people amassed power, white men continued to assert their dominance because they were afraid of change, and sometimes between white people talking over them and being racist, Black people got to be funny.”
― Megan Giddings, The Women Could Fly

“Once, there were men who loved to see punishment. They were elected officials, businessmen, community pillars, and every kind of man in between. They loved anything that would balkanize everyone they considered beneath them. If everyone was busy fighting for their rights, fighting each other, and the men stayed together, they would always get to be in charge of everything.”
― Megan Giddings, The Women Could Fly

“People want to believe these research studies are about something simple that they can relate to like winning a contest. They don’t want to think about why a government would want to experiment on its citizens.

They do it because they can, I said. Because you don’t see us as people.”
― Megan Giddings, Lakewood

“Thinking about him taking the time to put lotion on his hands, considering how they would feel to me, made me smile. Then, I paused, and wondered if my standards were too low.”
― Megan Giddings, The Women Could Fly

“She suddenly understood the thought experiments better based on this feeling, the uncanniness of someone you love being able to abruptly articulate a single feeling. Friendship, family, and romance breed a telepathy that comes from kinship.”
― Megan Giddings, Lakewood

“it’s the only way we can talk about the consequences of the past without feeling responsible for our present actions.”
― Megan Giddings, Lakewood

“The only dependable way to survive today is to put your faith in the power of other people wanting to give you money. Online fundraising. Corporations that still pretend to care what consumers think. They want to be able to say, See, look how benevolent we are, think about this instead of how we’re polluting the ocean and not paying our workers enough.”
― Megan Giddings, Lakewood

“There are times in your life, Lena knew, where to think actively about what was happening in the moment, what had recently happened, would shatter everything.”
― Megan Giddings, Lakewood

“The closest I can come to describing how I felt at that moment was I was sentient champagne. I loved the feeling of being exposed to the air, fizzing over my bottle’s edge.”
― Megan Giddings, Lakewood

“Deziree said there were good and bad people of all races. And really, maybe you shouldn’t trust anybody completely until they proved they were going to treat you right.”
― Megan Giddings, Lakewood