Andrea Bartz > Quotes

“Just because a feeling is real doesn’t mean it’s true.”
― Andrea Bartz, We Were Never Here

“Power is a funny thing. You know how they say that the opposite of love isn’t hate, it’s indifference? Like, we’re looking at the scale all wrong.” She tapped her nail against the glass. “I think it’s the same thing with fear. The opposite of fear isn’t safety. It’s power.”
― Andrea Bartz, We Were Never Here

“All the hand-wringing about women tempting fate by going on adventures, how it was our responsibility to protect ourselves…wasn’t it simply a way to keep women’s lives small? To keep us cowering at home, controlled, contained?”
― Andrea Bartz, We Were Never Here

“I'd been so focused on running away, I'd almost missed what I was running to.”
― Andrea Bartz, We Were Never Here

“Why does thank you so often throw on a suit and stand in for fuck you?”
― Andrea Bartz, The Herd

“Breathed louder, harder, both of our breaths rhythmic and sultry, until all that existed was the feeling, deep and tender and raw.”
― Andrea Bartz, We Were Never Here

“Cognitive behavioral therapy is kind of the same thing: You examine your thoughts like a scientist so you can challenge the ones that don’t hold up. So let’s look at this fear, this belief or, or thought pattern you’ve noticed. Just because a feeling is real doesn’t mean it’s true.”
― Andrea Bartz, We Were Never Here

“Fates again, the three of them, sisters who carried torches, whips, and cups of venom to punish wrongdoers on Earth.”
― Andrea Bartz, The Herd

“I thought back to a soliloquy I’d seen on TV about pain as women’s birthright. It’s not hard to catalog the dazzling torment life puts us through: childbirth and menstrual cramps and the suffocating heat of menopause. We do our best to avoid it, but men run toward it: war and wrestling and football that cracks their skulls, bruises the fragile gray matter underneath. Their bravado is just them manufacturing their own pain, trying to seem strong. But fear—fear is at least as strong a motivator as pain. Maybe the TV show had it wrong; maybe men aren’t out to experience pain so much as fear, the icy jolt of feeling alive. They crave it because they have no idea how miserable it is to feel that frigid blast a hundred times a day.”
― Andrea Bartz, We Were Never Here

“Edit the feed to limit the hysteria.”
― Andrea Bartz, We Were Never Here

“Who knows what else is unwittingly documented in people’s phones and hard drives and dusty photo albums, background noise that would swell with meaning to a different audience?”
― Andrea Bartz, We Were Never Here

“I’ve just been thinking back to those days. Remembering. Well, remembering what it’s like to wake up and not remember anything, which is sort of a Möbius strip of remembering.”
― Andrea Bartz, The Lost Night

“I thought back to a soliloquy I’d seen on TV about pain as women’s birthright. It’s not hard to catalog the dazzling torment life puts us through: childbirth and menstrual cramps and the suffocating heat of menopause. We do our best to avoid it, but men run toward it: war and wrestling and football that cracks their skulls, bruises the fragile gray matter underneath. Their bravado is just them manufacturing their own pain, trying to seem strong. But fear—fear is at least as strong a motivator as pain. Maybe the TV show had it wrong; maybe men aren’t out to experience pain so much as fear, the icy jolt of feeling alive. They crave it because they have no idea how miserable it is to feel that frigid blast a hundred times a day. I”
― Andrea Bartz, We Were Never Here

“caught. Now she sounded like a wild-eyed conspiracy theorist, quivering under a space blanket and tinfoil hat.”
― Andrea Bartz, We Were Never Here

“But fear—fear is at least as strong a motivator as pain.”
― Andrea Bartz, We Were Never Here

“doubt it applies to the Herd. It’s one place where you’re free from the male gaze.” “But I think it’s conditioned—an automatic response to being watched all our lives,”
― Andrea Bartz, The Herd

“Nice girls don’t walk around with anger brewing in their chest. With blood on their palms and dirt under their nails from participating in their own late-night horror story.”
― Andrea Bartz, We Were Never Here

“Which was worse, being invisible or being seen?”
― Andrea Bartz, We Were Never Here

“I envied men’s indifference to personal safety—how they could amble through a dark alley without thinking twice.”
― Andrea Bartz, We Were Never Here

“Take my parents—I skimmed past them like floaters in their vision, a refraction of light in the retina.”
― Andrea Bartz, We Were Never Here

“Some people would say that hijacking your birthday plans is not respecting your boundaries.”
― Andrea Bartz, We Were Never Here

“I think it’s the same thing with fear. The opposite of fear isn’t safety. It’s power.”
― Andrea Bartz, We Were Never Here

“So much power. So much confidence. Confidence—that was another item on the list of traits the modern woman is supposed to exude. Not vanity, not Kardashian bluster, but a deep fearlessness, Lizzo Vibes, Beyoncé Power. Big Dick Energy.”
― Andrea Bartz, We Were Never Here

“How could she remain so blasé about the discovery of Paolo’s body? And our conversation on Thursday, when she’d briefly convinced me she was as shaken as I was—why did that now feel like a trick, a trap?”
― Andrea Bartz, We Were Never Here

“The irony: I'd been thrilled when Aaron noticed me, and when, tonight, he called me his girlfriend. But on the street, I tried to creep past any other male gazes, ghostlike. That's womanhood, I suppose, both craving and feeling repulsed by attention.”
― Andrea Bartz, We Were Never Here

“Whenever a butterfly whiffled by, my eyes brimmed with joy, as if we shared a secret.”
― Andrea Bartz, We Were Never Here

“methylenedioxymethamphetamine”
― Andrea Bartz, The Lost Night

“My cry scattered through the trees, reverberated around the lake, rose toward the umbrella of stars.”
― Andrea Bartz, We Were Never Here

“She doesn’t talk about it, the same way movie stars don’t talk about their stalkers. The worst thing you can do is give an attention-seeker attention.”
― Andrea Bartz, The Herd

“They crave it because they have no idea how miserable it is to feel that frigid blast a hundred times a day.”
― Andrea Bartz, We Were Never Here