Sara Sligar > Quotes

“I think I believed him just because he said I was different. Men do that. They separate us from the pack. And we are grateful, because the pack is a dangerous place to be.”
― Sara Sligar, Take Me Apart

“I didn’t know fear before. I didn’t know how it could shape you. Make you do things you didn’t want to do. I didn’t know how it lives in you like dye, like a stain that will never come out. How it works its way through you until your blood is made of it, until it is fear that pushes oxygen through your veins, fear that pumps your heart, open and shut, open and shut. The fear has no subject. It has no ground. It has only me, and some days it eats me alive.”
― Sara Sligar, Take Me Apart

“Men are always better at being crazy. Better at being forgiven. The blood on their hands can be real, not imagined. They can be bought and sold and still no one thinks they are owned.”
― Sara Sligar, Take Me Apart

“How do you talk to other people, afterward? After the worst, I mean. After your brain swells you up and spits you out, a saliva lump of a human being. How do you communicate with people who spent that entire time in charge of their own mind?”
― Sara Sligar, Take Me Apart

“As if the alcohol could slow everyone’s hearts, clean out all their wounds. As if Sabrina, or Kate, or any woman, just needed the world to be a little blurrier, and that would put their pain at the right level, a level that was tolerable and small.”
― Sara Sligar, Take Me Apart

“Theo.”
― Sara Sligar, Take Me Apart

“Learning that some people are oblivious makes the public humiliation feel less total, but it’s also weirdly embarrassing to realize that you’re buckling under the weight of something smaller than you thought.”
― Sara Sligar, Vantage Point

“She was petite—she had a metabolism that could process pig lard into sinewy muscle—with a head of tight, tiny curls that always looked just a little wet.”
― Sara Sligar, Take Me Apart

“she”
― Sara Sligar, Take Me Apart

“Warren”
― Sara Sligar, Take Me Apart

“When Kate had been waiting out her winter, everyone told her to get over it, work through it, talk it out. As if prepositions could protect her. As if others knew whatever lay beyond was better. In reality, all anyone knew was that it came next.”
― Sara Sligar, Take Me Apart

“But this child is mostly mine. We forged each other in a way Jake can never understand. Even if he had been here. He can never know how, over the past nine months, my body became a thing I shared. It became our body. And then, after nine hours of labor, our body split in two. Flesh from flesh. The child and me.”
― Sara Sligar, Take Me Apart

“Of course I shouldn’t expect him to know, magically, what I want. But is it really such an insane expectation? After all, I know what he wants. I know what he believes, what he dreads, what he needs. More than that, I know why. I know why he forces food on Clara, why he doesn’t go on diving boards, why he said yes so quickly to the Senate run. I know these things, and not because he sat me down and explained them to me, but because I pay attention. I observe and draw conclusions, and then I take those conclusions and push them outward, so that I might consider what else in his life that reason might affect. For example: he avoids diving boards because they’re slippery, he says, and I conclude it reminds him of how his parents died, and I conclude therefore he will also want the outdoor stairs to have nonslip treads, and he will want his shoes to be replaced before they lose traction, and he will want to be warned before Stephanie waxes the floors. I consider the whole chain reaction. I anticipate him. I work at knowing him. Is it so much to ask, that he might work at knowing me?”
― Sara Sligar, Vantage Point

“Theo”
― Sara Sligar, Take Me Apart

“Delia”
― Sara Sligar, Take Me Apart