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

“I am a lighthouse to myself.”
― 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

“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’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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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 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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“don’t know how many of you reading this essay are hungry. If you are, does it make it harder to concentrate? Does it make it harder to smile? Where do you hold that tension in your body?”
― Lilly Dancyger, Burn It Down: Women Writing about Anger

“When you don’t know how to do the things you’re expected to do, it can be so much easier to declare them bullshit and say you never wanted to be a part of it anyway. But how sweet to fall into step, to feel like maybe you know what you’re doing just enough to fake your way to that magic place called stability, where you’ll finally be able to let your guard down.”
― Lilly Dancyger, Negative Space

“Heroin is insidious—it doesn’t destroy all at once. It rots a person, slowly, from the inside out, so that by the time you can see the damage, it’s often too late.”
― Lilly Dancyger, Negative Space

“In the religious household and schools I was raised in, I was taught that anger was dangerous because of its proximity to hostility, violence, malice, and hate. Anger in and of itself wasn’t wrong, per se, but wrath, a close cousin, was one of the seven deadly sins. It was difficult to coexist with anger.”
― Lilly Dancyger, Burn It Down: Women Writing about Anger

“They say all the cells in your body regenerate every seven years. When I turned twenty, my father had been dead for eight—so if that theory is true, no cell in my body had ever been on the planet at the same time as him. I’d changed, cell by cell, into a person he never knew.”
― Lilly Dancyger, Negative Space

“Technically, the first people I loved were my parents. But that’s a different kind of love, an imbalanced love, where the expectation is that most of the care will flow in one direction—at least early on. And it’s something of a given. Not everyone has loving parents in their early life, but when you do, you don’t tend to imagine it could be any other way. Your parents are there like the sun, like bedtime, like sustenance.”
― Lilly Dancyger, First Love: Essays on Friendship