Ruby Warrington > Quotes

“For many of us, getting Sober Curious begins with a simple question: Would my life be better without alcohol? To discover the answer for yourself, all that remains is to put the cork back in the bottle, open your eyes, and see.”
― Ruby Warrington, Sober Curious: The Blissful Sleep, Greater Focus, Limitless Presence, and Deep Connection Awaiting Us All on the Other Side of Alcohol

“Motherhood is no longer a necessary nor a sufficient condition for maturity or fulfillment,”
― Ruby Warrington, Women Without Kids: The Revolutionary Rise of an Unsung Sisterhood

“FOUR BODIES WELLNESS Four bodies wellness means paying attention to our health on four levels: physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual. For me, a sense of overall well-being kicked in fully only after I began to address all “four bodies” of my health—when I began to prioritize daily physical exercise as a way to wake up my chi (life force) and connect my body to my spirit, meditation to befriend my monkey mind, and got on board with the idea that “toxins” could be thoughts, feelings, and situations as much as substances. For example, the gut issues I”
― Ruby Warrington, Sober Curious: The Blissful Sleep, Greater Focus, Limitless Presence, and Deep Connection Awaiting Us All on the Other Side of Alcohol

“The regulation of women’s reproductive power by men . . . the legal and technical control by men of contraception, fertility, abortion, obstetrics, gynecology, and extrauterine reproductive experiments—are all essential to the patriarchal”
― Ruby Warrington, Women Without Kids: The Revolutionary Rise of an Unsung Sisterhood

“Peace and happiness which it could be said are not only the goal, but the baseline, default state of being that we naturally return to—once whatever led to anxiety, anger, or sadness stepping in has been resolved. You may well have experienced the relief, and lightness of being, that’s the result of instigating a difficult yet necessary conversation or quitting a job or relationship that’s been crushing your spirit. Could it be that joy was there all along, like a balloon held underwater always trying to bob to the surface? Since alcohol is a known depressant, it makes sense that the immediate aftereffects of quitting drinking may include some buoyant skipping down of streets and eruptions of laughter. But once the initial bounce-back has passed, our newfound clarity will likely lead us to dig deeper into and address the root causes of our anxiety, anger, sadness, etc. At which point, a blissful sense of liberation can give way to what feels like some pretty heavy lifting.”
― Ruby Warrington, Sober Curious: The Blissful Sleep, Greater Focus, Limitless Presence, and Deep Connection Awaiting Us All on the Other Side of Alcohol

“Am I Willing to Risk My Mental Health to Have a Baby?” “I sometimes think that guarding my sanity so ferociously makes me selfish,”
― Ruby Warrington, Women Without Kids: The Revolutionary Rise of an Unsung Sisterhood

“Sanskrit word tapas means “to heat,” and when used in yoga it speaks to the practice of “standing in the fire for the sake of positive change,” says Stephanie Snyder. Literally, this means holding a difficult pose, feeling the burn as muscles tighten and contract, maintaining the mental focus it takes to stay in the pose—and choosing to endure all this in the name of becoming stronger, more agile, unfuckwithable. Applied metaphorically to our Sober Curiosity, it means sitting in whatever WTF we happen to be experiencing as a result of not drinking, watching it pass, and choosing to focus on the positive parts of the experience. These positives”
― Ruby Warrington, Sober Curious: The Blissful Sleep, Greater Focus, Limitless Presence, and Deep Connection Awaiting Us All on the Other Side of Alcohol

“You can drink all the green juice, dodge all the gluten, and run around town in all the fancy yoga pants you like—but it means nothing if you’re not also addressing your mental, emotional, and spiritual well-being.”
― Ruby Warrington, Sober Curious: The Blissful Sleep, Greater Focus, Limitless Presence, and Deep Connection Awaiting Us All on the Other Side of Alcohol

“As Jeanne Safer writes: “My decision never to bear children reflects my entire history, the interaction of temperament and circumstance, fear and desire, capacities and limitations, that makes me who I am.”
― Ruby Warrington, Women Without Kids: The Revolutionary Rise of an Unsung Sisterhood

“Instead of tying yourself to the mast to resist the Sirens’ song, you must recognize the Sirens as harbingers of death and reframe their songs as background noise.”
― Ruby Warrington, Sober Curious: The Blissful Sleep, Greater Focus, Limitless Presence, and Deep Connection Awaiting Us All on the Other Side of Alcohol

“Amanda Capobianco who first coined the hashtag #HealingIsTheNewNightlife after moving to Williamsburg in Brooklyn, where she expected to spend late nights listening to bands in grimy dive bars and instead found herself socializing at sound baths, moon circles, and breathwork sessions.”
― Ruby Warrington, Sober Curious: The Blissful Sleep, Greater Focus, Limitless Presence, and Deep Connection Awaiting Us All on the Other Side of Alcohol

“This is the essence of what it means to be sovereign: that is, the ultimate authority over our own life. When we are sovereign, we are no longer swayed by the projections and the expectations of others. As Jody Day describes it, "Being sovereign means you cannot be owned; that you are unownable." Meanwhile, age releases women from the belief that our value lies primarily in our physical attractiveness.”
― Ruby Warrington, Women Without Kids: The Revolutionary Rise of an Unsung Sisterhood

“shift in Caliban and the Witch—in which she posits that the very purpose of the witch hunts that accompanied this era, for example, was to put control of women’s bodies and reproductive function into the hands of the newly minted owning class: wealthy white men, a.k.a. the founding fathers of patriarchy. Said “witches” represented “a world of female subjects that capitalism had to destroy: the heretic, the healer, the disobedient wife, the woman who dared to live alone.” Among them, many a woman without kids. Women in turn whose life choices went against the requirements of the developing capitalist machine, which demanded a continual source of fresh “labor-power” (i.e., people) in order to fulfill its mandate of perpetual growth.”
― Ruby Warrington, Women Without Kids: The Revolutionary Rise of an Unsung Sisterhood

“it all has the same rotten root: pronatalism. The ideology, that is, that says “parents are more important than non-parents, and that families are more respectable and more valid than single people.”
― Ruby Warrington, Women Without Kids: The Revolutionary Rise of an Unsung Sisterhood

“But me not being a mother feels as fundamentally a part of me as the freckles on my face; not something I would ever have thought to question had it not become apparent that someday, being somebody's mom would be expected of me.”
― Ruby Warrington, Women Without Kids: The Revolutionary Rise of an Unsung Sisterhood

“[T]hese are the lives and the lived-in faces that I look to when I envision being nobody's grandma.

Each of these women, for me, seems both youthful and wise, experimental and accomplished, as if the little girl that she once was is right there, a twinkle in the corner of her own eye”
― Ruby Warrington, Women Without Kids: The Revolutionary Rise of an Unsung Sisterhood

“Pronatalism is also the reason there is still no specific, widely used terminology that validates the life-path of women without kids: we are non-mothers, women without kids, either child-less or child-free, all of which emphasize the absence of a child.”
― Ruby Warrington, Women Without Kids: The Revolutionary Rise of an Unsung Sisterhood