Danielle Henderson > Quotes

“Grandma had been encouraging me to castrate men since I was old enough to know what dicks even were.”
― Danielle Henderson, The Ugly Cry

“As a woman who chooses to be childless, I generally have just one problem: other adults. Living in a culture where women are assumed to prioritize motherhood above all else and where a woman's personal choices are often considered matters of public discussion means everyone things they have the right to discuss my body and my choices, so anyone curious about my lack of spawn feels the right to march right on over and ask me about it.”
― Danielle Henderson, Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed: Sixteen Writers on The Decision Not To Have Kids

“As bothered as I am by having to defend my decision, I’m more incensed that people think they have the right to ask.”
― Danielle Henderson, Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed: Sixteen Writers on The Decision Not To Have Kids

“When I was born and the nurse held me like a football, when I opened my creepy little eyes, the first person I saw was my grandmother. I opened my eyes and saw the love of my life.”
― Danielle Henderson, The Ugly Cry: How I Became a Person

“Normally when I tell people I'm a gender studies major, they look at me like I'm studying Sanskrit or Latin. But now, NOW I had something to show my family, to possibly convince them that one day I would be employable. Look! People still like feminism! Or maybe they just really like Ryan Gosling's face. But they're getting that face with a dose of feminism! Like it or not.”
― Danielle Henderson, Feminist Ryan Gosling: Feminist Theory (as Imagined) from Your Favorite Sensitive Movie Dude

“Children were not to be seen or heard and were definitely not to complain about any injuries sustained during the fifteen hours a day we were roaming the streets. The 1980s were a decade of neglect, and I haven’t felt freedom or terror like it since.”
― Danielle Henderson, The Ugly Cry: How I Became a Person

“My grandma was the scariest person I’d ever met, and I could not imagine any man having the ability to terrify me more than her.”
― Danielle Henderson, The Ugly Cry: How I Became a Person

“Every day, I try to be my own parent - the parent I never had.”
― Danielle Henderson, Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed: Sixteen Writers on The Decision Not To Have Kids

“The rush of adrenaline I used to get when someone told me I could stay up past my bedtime has since been replaced with the wave of euphoria I feel whenever I realize I can go to sleep before 9:00 p.m.”
― Danielle Henderson, The Ugly Cry: How I Became a Person

“If you see a teenager in the wild, be gentle. Every single one, even the coolest among them, is navigating the world like a twitching sack of snakes stuck in the molting phase.”
― Danielle Henderson, The Ugly Cry: How I Became a Person

“I negotiate the terms of my life every day and work hard to maintain an emotional status quo that I had to create from scratch.”
― Danielle Henderson, Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed: Sixteen Writers on The Decision Not To Have Kids

“If touching a spider kills you, well, I guess you were too delicate for this earth, and it was nice knowing you.” My summers always started with a firm acknowledgment that I might die as a result of trying to enjoy them.”
― Danielle Henderson, The Ugly Cry: How I Became a Person

“There's no way to tell if Ryan Gosling is actually a feminist; feminism is a serious business, and something you have to come to on your own terms. He hasn't actually said anything in this book. But he is charming, talented, and intelligent; he has said some things in the media that can be construed as feminist. He loves his mom and takes ballet. He has nice things to say about the women he dates. It's not too far-fetched, right?”
― Danielle Henderson, Feminist Ryan Gosling: Feminist Theory (as Imagined) from Your Favorite Sensitive Movie Dude

“A lot of people who had terrible childhoods have kids to prove that they can do a better job, or to fix some cosmic rift by being the parents they needed to their own children.”
― Danielle Henderson, Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed: Sixteen Writers on The Decision Not To Have Kids

“I was surrounded by whiteness and hadn’t yet learned that I was beautiful in a different way.”
― Danielle Henderson, The Ugly Cry

“Grandma never understood fear, especially if it was someone else’s.”
― Danielle Henderson, The Ugly Cry: How I Became a Person

“I don’t resemble my mom at all. Mom made beauty seem like a magic trick I’d never learn. I think there was a part of me that was trying, in those moments, to know her deeply, deep enough so that I could one day bring to light any small part of me that was hers. —”
― Danielle Henderson, The Ugly Cry: How I Became a Person

“Danielle Elizabeth Henderson! Get your ass over here!' she shouted. Grandma always used my full name when she was angry. None of the shoppers around her turned a head or lifted a finger to help; in the 1980s, department stores were full of people shouting the names of temporarily lost children, a cacophony of negligent parenting always ringing out like the last act of an opera.”
― Danielle Henderson, The Ugly Cry

“It was possible that I could stop assuming that no one could handle the whole mess of me and give them a chance to surprise me instead.”
― Danielle Henderson, The Ugly Cry

“It slowly dawned on me: if I could lie and be quickly forgiven, there was nothing to stop me from actually doing some of the stuff I was making up. Catholicism flipped a switch and turned me on to a life of crime.”
― Danielle Henderson, The Ugly Cry: How I Became a Person

“Throughout the eighties, kidnapping was deployed as an empty threat by overworked, exhausted parents who wanted to keep us close enough to elude Child Protective Services but far enough away to not ever have to see, hear, or smell anything we were playing with.”
― Danielle Henderson, The Ugly Cry: How I Became a Person

“I’d never met him, so I never missed him.”
― Danielle Henderson, The Ugly Cry: How I Became a Person

“Like serial killers and three of the worst men I ever dated, I never really had a grasp on what I was supposed to feel sorry about. Week after week, I filled the confessional with lies. I yelled at my teacher. I stole my best friend’s favorite toy. I kicked a dog. I punched my brother in the nuts.”
― Danielle Henderson, The Ugly Cry: How I Became a Person

“At nineteen, she had decided that her life was her own, and she was going to use it to chase a man.”
― Danielle Henderson, The Ugly Cry: How I Became a Person

“If anyone tries to grab you, you know what to do?” I rolled my eyes again. “Cut his dick off.” “That’s right,” Grandma said. She pointed at me and tilted her head up to look me in the eye. “If anybody ever puts their hands on you, you cut their pecker right off.”
― Danielle Henderson, The Ugly Cry: How I Became a Person

“A cold feeling crept through my body and settled on my skin in a cool sweat as I realized: the person I counted on most in the world was just as powerless as I was.”
― Danielle Henderson, The Ugly Cry: How I Became a Person

“The indoor rules were simple: don’t touch anything that wasn’t in your book bag. Did you come home from school, grab a glass, pour yourself some juice, and camp out in front of the TV watching cartoons? Congratulations, Anne of Green Gables, your childhood was fucking rad. We weren’t allowed to touch the glasses anymore after I broke the Hamburglar tumbler from our set of McDonald’s fine china. We didn’t have juice boxes because we were on welfare, and I would rather have chewed tinfoil than recreationally drink powdered milk. We”
― Danielle Henderson, The Ugly Cry: How I Became a Person

“The indoor rules were simple: don’t touch anything that wasn’t in your book bag. Did you come home from school, grab a glass, pour yourself some juice, and camp out in front of the TV watching cartoons? Congratulations, Anne of Green Gables, your childhood was fucking rad. We weren’t allowed to touch the glasses anymore after I broke the Hamburglar tumbler from our set of McDonald’s fine china. We didn’t have juice boxes because we were on welfare, and I would rather have chewed tinfoil than recreationally drink powdered milk. We tried to watch TV once, turning it off as soon as we heard Mom’s footsteps on the landing, but technology in the eighties was intent on destroying our flimsy excuses. “Were you watching TV?” Cory and I would give each other the knowing glance of liars everywhere and say, “No.” Mom would then go over, touch the TV, and, feeling the warmth emanating from the screen, rip our story apart in three seconds flat. Disobeying her wasn’t the worst offense—we were wasting electricity, and no parent in the country could abide using electricity for the intended purpose if they were not the ones flipping the switch. When Mom was home, you could fire up every light in the house, leave an empty blender running full speed, and overload every outlet until the fuses popped like fireworks. But children alone were unworthy of electricity, so I guess the expectation was we could spend our time weaving brooms out of hay and banging out candle holders on a tin press. We had to make our own fun, so we invented Spiderweb City.”
― Danielle Henderson, The Ugly Cry: How I Became a Person

“I craved my mom, even when she was standing right next to me. With her hand in mine and my head resting on her hip, I wondered what I could do to make her feel as light as she seemed to be with everyone else. I wanted her to gently touch my arm and laugh at my knock-knock jokes the way she did when strangers said anything at all. What would it feel like to have my mom all to myself?”
― Danielle Henderson, The Ugly Cry: How I Became a Person

“My grandparents got creative to make space for three kids in their two-bedroom home. They took one of the bedrooms, my mom and aunt shared the other, and my uncle Bobby slept on the screened-in porch. Every single one of your neighbors would call Child Protective Services if you put a child on the porch these days, but this was the seventies, which was basically a lawless decade where children were concerned. Lawn Darts -- a game where one child would stand in a Hula-Hoop placed on the ground and another child would aim for the hoop by launching oversize, spiky metal darts at them -- hit its peak in this year for a reason: if your child was fed and moderately clothed, people turned a blind eye to your second-degree murder-adjacent shenanigans.”
― Danielle Henderson, The Ugly Cry