Lilly Dancyger > Quotes

“I’m angry that we’ve been taught to swallow our pain to save you.”
― Lilly Dancyger, Burn It Down: Women Writing about Anger

“Everything I've learned from the time I was born is essentially some form of control. Basic lessons: how to control my hands, my body. Advanced lessons: how to control my volume, my appearance. Having control over myself allows me to choose. I can present myself as loudly or as softly, as boldly or as meekly, as wildly or as calmly as you wish.”
― Lilly Dancyger, Burn It Down: Women Writing about Anger

“My anger signals the presence of injustice. His tends to flare in the presence of personal insult. Rather than being shameful, my rage is noble.”
― Lilly Dancyger, Burn It Down: Women Writing about Anger

“There is too much beauty in being alive to silence my intuition, to ignore my body, to not sing its needs and demand that they be met. As it turns out, my anger has become my savior.”
― Lilly Dancyger, Burn It Down: Women Writing about Anger

“That night, I began to understand that there’s a difference between someone actively trying to harm you and someone’s specific constellation of shortcomings being harmful to you. It’s the difference between an earthquake, inescapable and unanticipated, tearing everything you’ve built down and stepping into the path of a tornado even as the sirens ring out their warning.”
― Lilly Dancyger, Burn It Down: Women Writing about Anger

“Grief is a place you can't travel to without being transformed. You eat the seeds and then you become queen of a land you never even wanted to visit.”
― Lilly Dancyger, First Love: Essays on Friendship

“I am a lighthouse to myself.”
― Lilly Dancyger, Burn It Down: Women Writing about Anger

“Rage was the dominion of men, who seemed to have unlimited social safety. My mother showed me how to respond to an angry man: lowered head, those tight lips, and attending to every detail that might end this particular tantrum or ward off the next. Be meek. Get small. Stay busy. Men emitted. Women absorbed.”
― Lilly Dancyger, Burn It Down: Women Writing about Anger

“Anger in a woman is akin to madness; it felt like madness inside of me, it looked like madness to others. Maybe if they let us be angry, we wouldn’t go mad.”
― Lilly Dancyger, Burn It Down: Women Writing about Anger

“Of course, it wasn’t only the smoky cafés themselves that I craved, but everything they represented: gathering places for people who didn’t want to spend their afternoons shopping, communities built around creativity, places and people that let you escape the daily grind to sit still and talk about ideas and ask questions without answers.”
― Lilly Dancyger, First Love: Essays on Friendship

“I’ve been raised to be a nurturer, continually cognizant of others, devoted to the collective harmony. When I’ve felt—when I feel—anger, it is spurred by witnessing and experiencing injustice.”
― Lilly Dancyger, Burn It Down: Women Writing about Anger

“Just as women who are so often reduced to sexual objects or babymakers, caregivers, mothers, virgins, and whores, deserve to be considered as whole individuals on their own terms and for their own sakes, I wanted to give their anger space to exist solely for itself, without being packaged and used for someone else’s”
― Lilly Dancyger, Burn It Down: Women Writing about Anger

“I already knew that art was a way to articulate one’s loneliness, but I hadn’t known it was also a way to articulate anger. Or that the roiling energy inside a woman’s body could be used to express her rage instead of poisoning her.”
― Lilly Dancyger, Burn It Down: Women Writing about Anger

“The idea that the very things that have made you feel different and wrong are not only impressive and romantic, but they can connect you with someone else, is intoxicating. Irresistible. It feels like acceptance and absolution, like being fully seen and loved for exactly who you are.”
― Lilly Dancyger, First Love: Essays on Friendship

“The truth is, if the pain wasn’t as severe as it was, I may have just cowered and ignored my instincts. I may have just accepted that I was being paranoid, hysterical, overly sensitive. Why does it take so much to make them see?”
― Lilly Dancyger, Burn It Down: Women Writing about Anger

“The silencing and the invisibility lead to anger, and the anger leads to sickness. Poverty and ignorant employers lead to anger, and the anger leads to sickness. Insurance bureaucracy and the lack of social and community accommodation lead to anger, and the anger leads to sickness. The whole cycle is broken; the body learns to lean into that constant surge of stress hormones and negativity, and the body stays ill.”
― Lilly Dancyger, Burn It Down: Women Writing about Anger

“The phenomenon of female anger has often been turned against itself, the figure of the angry woman reframed as threat—not the one who has been harmed, but the one bent on harming.”
― Lilly Dancyger, Burn It Down: Women Writing about Anger

“History has drawn women in the shape of weakness. In the shape of melodrama. In the shape of less-than.”
― Lilly Dancyger, Burn It Down: Women Writing about Anger

“The human body creates three types of tears: basal tears, which keep your eyes lubricated and functional; reflex tears, which are produced in response to a physical stimulus like dust in the eye in order to remove the irritant; and psychic tears, which are emotionally responsive tears. Other animals make the first two kinds; human beings are the only animal known to make psychic tears.”
― Lilly Dancyger, Burn It Down: Women Writing about Anger

“My anger signals the presence of injustice. His tends to flare in the presence of personal insult.”
― Lilly Dancyger, Burn It Down: Women Writing about Anger

“I decided to work at happiness, to unlearn self-hatred. Inspired by that chance moment of appreciating my own reflection, I decided I would learn to love myself by saying four things I liked about myself out loud, every day.”
― Lilly Dancyger, Burn It Down: Women Writing about Anger

“It was a small interaction—a passing quip and a shared smoke. But it strikes me now that the first thing I ever said to Haley other than my own name was “Me too,” a phrase that would echo back and forth between us through the rest of our friendship as we relished all the ways we were similar, and then began to reshape our personalities and preferences to become more and more alike.”
― Lilly Dancyger, First Love: Essays on Friendship

“It’s true that I’ve never been satisfied with friendships that stay on the surface. That my friends are my family, my truest beloveds, each relationship a world of its own. The best compliment I’ve ever been given was “You’re so many people’s best friend.” Maybe I’ve always sought friendships predicated on deep love and knowing—been unwilling to settle for less—because I learned at such a young age that they’re possible.”
― Lilly Dancyger, First Love: Essays on Friendship

“Bellowing, howling anger has been written on top of my DNA. It’s how I want to respond to frustration. But because I was also taught to be a good girl and keep it to myself, my anger feels warped into something even more unnatural than hateful. I resent that, too.”
― Lilly Dancyger, Burn It Down: Women Writing about Anger

“Audrey Wollen, who coined the term Sad Girl Theory as a framework for her photography and general creative philosophy, argued that expressing sadness could be a form of resistance to the expectation that girls be pleasant and pliable all the time.”
― Lilly Dancyger, First Love: Essays on Friendship

“The Paris that Nin described was the world she had created: It was the people she surrounded herself with and the conversations she had—of course there had never been a time when the whole city was like that, but all along, the Paris (and the New York) I’d craved was there, available to those who knew how to look. The magic of Nin and her writing was not just in the world she inhabited, but in the way she saw it, and her determination to see it that way—“I am possessed by a fever for knowledge, experience, and creation,” she wrote. I understood then that the kind of exultant, creative life where everything is art and the “monotony, boredom, death” of “normal” life is kept constantly at bay is not a place that can be traveled to, or a time I missed out on: It’s a way of living and a way of seeing that Nin was a master of, and that I could be, too.”
― Lilly Dancyger, First Love: Essays on Friendship

“It sounded as though the singer had gathered up all the energy it required to hate oneself and disowned it, flung it outside of her in the form of this beautiful noise.”
― Lilly Dancyger, Burn It Down: Women Writing about Anger

“There was power in subtlety, I was learning; in the simplicity of grounded self-assuredness that doesn’t need to announce itself.”
― Lilly Dancyger, First Love: Essays on Friendship

“The right kind of sad girl is an iteration of one of the oldest feminine tropes there is: the damsel in distress. A sad girl is still lovable, because a sad girl can be rescued. Until it’s too late. A sad girl whose sadness consumes her becomes a tragic, romantic figure. She becomes her pain, and her pain becomes a thing we wrap ourselves in and claim. She becomes an emblem, a vessel, a warning. A patron saint for the next generation of sad girls to worship and emulate. And in the process, her complexity and humanity are annihilated.”
― Lilly Dancyger, First Love: Essays on Friendship

“We spent those weeks being kids together—I remember them as the very last days of my childhood, which I’d been halfway out the door and away from but was willing to turn around and stay in just a little longer with Sabina. We made up dances like we used to”
― Lilly Dancyger, First Love: Essays on Friendship