Elisa Albert > Quotes

“It's decidedly bizzare, when the Worst Thing hppens and you find yourself still conscious, still breathing.”
― Elisa Albert, The Book of Dahlia

“It’s always that way with periods of crisis: people you expect and want to be there for you are incapable and/or unwilling, and others you never imagined would be there for you show up with exactly what you need, exactly how you need it. And there is almost no way, alas, no way at all, to predict which people will be which.”
― Elisa Albert, After Birth

“Adrienne Rich had it right. No one gives a crap about motherhood unless they can profit off it. Women are expendable and the work of childbearing, done fully, done consciously, is all-consuming. So who’s gonna write about it if everyone doing it is lost forever within it? You want adventures, you want poetry and art, you want to salon it up over at Gertrude and Alice’s, you’d best leave the messy all-consuming baby stuff to someone else. Birthing and nursing and rocking and distracting and socializing and cooking and washing and gardening and mending: what’s that compared with bullets whizzing overhead, dazzling destructive heroics, headlines, parties,”
― Elisa Albert, After Birth

“The trick is to surrender completely, take your moments when you get them, don’t dare want for more.”
― Elisa Albert, After Birth

“A baby opens you up, is the problem. No way around it unless you want to pay someone else to have it for you. There’s before and there’s after. To live in your body before is one thing. To live in your body after is another. Some deal by attempting to micromanage; some go crazy; some zone right the hell on out. Or all of the above.”
― Elisa Albert, After Birth

“Fuck you, by the way, couples at couples tables at weddings who don’t go out of your way to engage with that one couple who doesn’t know anyone.”
― Elisa Albert, After Birth

“She developed a kind of disdain for her only sibling usually reserved for despotic political regimes and perpetrators of genocide.”
― Elisa Albert, The Book of Dahlia

“These tiny people, they're not about you. They are not for you. They do not belong to you. They are under your care, is all, and it's your job to work at being a decent human being, love them well and a lot, dont put your problems on them, dont make your problems thier problems, dont use them to occupy empty parts of yourself.”
― Elisa Albert, After Birth

“Volumes upon volumes on exploration, war, violence, the life-threatening transformative journeys of man. But you can't talk about this. The fucking, the sadness, the dark, the blood, the light. They will burn you at the fucking stake for this shit.”
― Elisa Albert, After Birth

“Here’s the problem: we are taught nothing. How to sew, grow food, preserve food, build things, fix things, make fires, birth babies, care for babies, feed babies, move through time, grow old, die, grieve, change, sit still, be quiet. Still and quiet, endless Interneters, quiet, quiet, quiet. How to be alone, how to shut up and be”
― Elisa Albert, After Birth

“You and your dyke music, Erica remarked once. I hadn’t thought of them as dykes, my beloved Indigo Girls, my Michelle Shocked, Dar Williams, Shawn Colvin, Le Tigre, my Ani DiFranco. I just knew that at those shows I was whole and right. I was a person. I mattered. I was in fact not stupid or fat or ugly or lame; I was smart and valid and right and well. I had a fucking voice. The women at those shows weren’t gussied up like geishas. They talked of art, life, politics. They felt entitled to feelings and opinions and rage and poetry and laughter and tears and bodies. There was dissent. Looking “cute” was low on the list. Practical shoes were high. It mattered only that one articulate oneself properly”
― Elisa Albert, After Birth

“One hundred years ago you'd have a child surrounded by other women: your mother, her mother, sisters, cousins, sisters-in-law, mother-in-law. And you'd be a teenager, too young to have had any kind of life yourself. You'd share childcare with a raft of women. They'd help you, keep you company, show you how. Then you'd do the same. Not just people to share in the work of raising children, but people to share in the loving of children.”
― Elisa Albert, After Birth

“Falling in love often is crucial. You just have to let it nourish you without giving in to it. Why turn it off entirely? Why deaden any part of yourself? Won’t death do that for you, and soon enough?”
― Elisa Albert, After Birth

“Muted pain, it turns out, is much worse than clear pain. Clear pain is quantifiable. One can face it, reckon with it, come away braver. There is no way to understand what you cannot feel. No reckoning to be had. It will haunt you forever, make you afraid. Still, they call her this laughable word: Survivor.”
― Elisa Albert, After Birth

“Are you some kind of witch? Yup, I reply, and stare him down.”
― Elisa Albert, After Birth

“Why so profane, ask the bookclubbers? Because we are talking here about death, and fuck you if you don't like it: You're going to die, too. This is serious. Fuck fuck fuck.”
― Elisa Albert, The Book of Dahlia

“No scrim, no filter, no bullshit. She wasn't all bound up in there, gagged and furious and resentful beneath some high-pitched shrink-wrapped mess of pleasantry.”
― Elisa Albert, After Birth

“People dont want to hear about that, dont want to entertain it. Vast numbers will watch two naked girls online shit in a cup then eat it, but babies enjoying the living hell out of breasts as a supreme source of endless free nourishment and good health for all remains taboo.”
― Elisa Albert, After Birth

“It’s always that way with periods of crisis: people you expect and want to be there for you are incapable and/or unwilling, and others you never imagined would be there for you show up with exactly what you need, exactly how you need it. And there is almost no way, alas, no way at all, to predict which people will be which.   Got”
― Elisa Albert, After Birth

“Paul's wanting does not hinge on anything other than the fact of me. This is an excellent trait in a man.”
― Elisa Albert, After Birth

“Avoiding pain will get you nowhere. Avoiding pain multiplies pain exponentially.”
― Elisa Albert, After Birth

“For as long as wimmin have had the temerity to experience feelings of anger, sadness, frustration, and deep resentment, patriarchal society has denied them these feelings, and, in fact, punished them heartily for feeling anything at all.”
― Elisa Albert, The Book of Dahlia

“A matter, as the famous book intoned, of finding the shade of the parachute that best complemented you. But really: With no parachute at all you'd hit the pavement so hard it probably wouldn't even hurt, and you'd unleash a whole new color palate-bone, blood, muscle-in the process.”
― Elisa Albert, The Book of Dahlia

“No, seriously, you should bury her up to her neck and throw rocks at her until she dies. What a crazy lunatic, offering her child a normal, healthy mammalian childhood. A woman in full bloom of health daring to use her body according to its biological design and function? Gross! When she could be purchasing from a multinational corporation a totally inferior product for the same purpose. That’s downright un-American. And to do so within full view of an intellectual such as yourself!? Tie her up and SET HER ON FUCKING FIRE.”
― Elisa Albert, After Birth

“I understood early that I’d find what I needed in books, if not in her. She gave me that.   But”
― Elisa Albert, After Birth

“Siblings, more than parents, more than teachers and friends and lovers and pets, shape the people we are.”
― Elisa Albert, Freud's Blind Spot: 23 Original Essays on Cherished, Estranged, Lost, Hurtful, Hopeful, Complicated Siblings

“book. I understood early that I’d find what I needed in books, if not in her. She gave me that.   But”
― Elisa Albert, After Birth

“You saved yourself, gorgeous, Crisp said. You just needed a little help laughing about it.”
― Elisa Albert, After Birth

“Why can't we fall in love--true and deep--without it being some huge threat to the working order of things? In another life Will and I might rip each others' clothes off with our teeth and make a whole new world out of entirely different problems. But this is not that life, and I get that.”
― Elisa Albert, After Birth

“What even is a voice? It’s the sound one makes with one’s larynx. The way one makes oneself heard. Breath, vibration, a style of narration. Phrasing. And when you’re singing from your bones and bowels, these things don’t need explaining. Everyone can feel it in their bones and bowels, animals and plants included. An unpasteurized experience. Honesty is the ultimate life giver. What would you do with all the energy you’d save if you never had to lie?”
― Elisa Albert, Human Blues