Lisa Taddeo > Quotes

“We pretend to want things we don't want so nobody can see us not getting what we need.”
― Lisa Taddeo, Three Women

“Women shouldn't judge each others lives, if we haven't been through one another's fires.”
― Lisa Taddeo, Three Women

“One inheritance of living under the male gaze for centuries is that heterosexual women often look at other women the way a man would.”
― Lisa Taddeo, Three Women

“May you not go around the world looking to fill what you fear you lack with the flesh of another human being.”
― Lisa Taddeo, Animal

“Throughout history, men have broken women’s hearts in a particular way. They love them or half-love them and then grow weary and spend weeks and months extricating themselves soundlessly, pulling their tails back into their doorways, drying themselves off, and never calling again. Meanwhile, women wait. The more in love they are and the fewer options they have, the longer they wait, hoping that he will return with a smashed phone, with a smashed face, and say, I’m sorry, I was buried alive and the only thing I thought of was you, and feared that you would think I’d forsaken you when the truth is only that I lost your number, it was stolen from me by the men who buried me alive, and I’ve spent three years looking in phone books and now I have found you. I didn’t disappear, everything I felt didn’t just leave. You were right to know that would be cruel, unconscionable, impossible. Marry me.”
― Lisa Taddeo, Three Women

“We don't remember what we want to remember. We remember what we can't forget.”
― Lisa Taddeo, Three Women

“Sometimes there’s nothing better on earth than someone asking you a question.”
― Lisa Taddeo, Three Women

“The problem, she’s starting to understand, is that a man will never let you fall completely into hell. He will scoop you up right before you drop the final inch so that you cannot blame him for sending you there. He keeps you in a dinerlike purgatory instead, waiting and hoping and taking orders.”
― Lisa Taddeo, Three Women

“When someone suffocates you with what they believe is love, even as you feel your air supply being cut off, you at least feel embraced.”
― Lisa Taddeo, Animal

“She said women are considered strong these days only if they didn’t talk about things they loved that didn’t love them, if they didn’t get hurt or allow themselves to be occasionally humiliated at their own hands, when, really, strength was being unashamed to want what you want.”
― Lisa Taddeo, Animal

“if people are denied certain parts of relationships they need as children, they hunt for these parts as adults.”
― Lisa Taddeo, Three Women

“It's the nuances of desire that hold the truth of who we are at our rawest moments. I set out to register the heat and sting of female want so that men and other women might more easily comprehend before they condemn. Because it's the quotidian moments of our lives that will go on forever, that will tell us who we were, who our neighbors and our mothers were, when we were too diligent in thinking they were nothing like us. This is the story of three women.”
― Lisa Taddeo, Three Women

“The world had set me up to believe that it was women who went mad. It was simply women’s pain that manifested as madness.”
― Lisa Taddeo, Animal

“The rumours, as usual, didn't take into account the complexity, much less the truth.”
― Lisa Taddeo, Three Women

“Look at me. I put this war paint on, but underneath I’m scarred and scared and horny and tired and love you.”
― Lisa Taddeo, Three Women

“My father did not become the bad guy for me. Not yet. That day I hated my mother for killing my father, but also for all the reasons you cannot say. Part of my child brain hated her because she wasn’t young enough or even beautiful enough. Because she wasn’t strong enough. Or because she was too strong. Because she was so complex where my father was not. I hated my mother, in short, for being a woman.”
― Lisa Taddeo, Animal

“Men were always putting their coats around my shoulders. They mark their territory that way. It’s better to freeze to death.”
― Lisa Taddeo, Animal

“There should be a stronger word than regret.”
― Lisa Taddeo, Three Women

“Little girls don’t kill people. They’re just silly little girls. But almost no one understands a little girl. We begin hard as marbles.”
― Lisa Taddeo, Animal

“Disappointment would mean that you were occasionally used to things going your way.”
― Lisa Taddeo, Three Women

“Her whole life stretches out before her, a path of imprecise but multiple directions. She could be an astronaut, a rap star, an accountant. She could be happy.”
― Lisa Taddeo, Three Women

“Let me tell you: men love cruelty. It reminds them of every time their fathers or mothers didn’t think they were good enough. Cruelty looks better on a woman than the perfect dress.”
― Lisa Taddeo, Animal

“I believe all men have a rapist in them, just dying to get out.”
― Lisa Taddeo, Animal

“The man is nothing. It’s what you think you are missing inside of yourself. I promise that you are missing nothing.”
― Lisa Taddeo, Animal

“Sleep is not sweet but dumb. It is a gap in time, a gap in pain.”
― Lisa Taddeo, Three Women

“The men noticed I'd stopped playing. Men are never okay when you stop. I had a fear of angering a man. Of not being amenable woman. I had the fear of being murdered. To assuage the guilt that I didn't follow up the flirtation by fucking them, I gave the movers each a tip of fifty dollars.”
― Lisa Taddeo, Animal

“So what’s the fantasy? It’s nothing, really, if you have to ask. Sure, yes, the fantasy is he did the stuff she didn’t even know she needed, like cleaning his amber drops off the rim of the toilet, getting the kids’ clothes ready for the following morning, putting the scissors back where the scissors go, he did a bunch of things before the thought of them even entered Sloane’s head. Invisible service, the kind she likes the waiters to practice in her restaurant. He cleared the room in her brain so that she might be able to get sexually excited in that now wide-open field up there where the to-dos aren’t scrolling and the boxes next to each task are checked—but that overwhelming list didn’t even get written up because he did it before she thought about it. He even walked the dog. Ha, she thinks. Come on. That’s crazy. After all, we don’t even have a fucking dog.”
― Lisa Taddeo, Three Women

“I don’t want you to continue the cycle of hate. I’ve been called a whore. I’ve been judged not only by the things I have done unto others but cruelly, by the things that happened to me. I envy the people who judge me. Those who live their lives in a neat predictable manner. The right college, the right house, the right time to move to a bigger one. The prescribed number of children, which sometimes is two and other times is three I would bet most of the people had not been through one percent of what I have.”
― Lisa Taddeo, Animal

“The way the wind blows in our country can make us question who we are in our own lives. Often the type of waiting women do is to make sure other women approve, so that they may also approve of themselves.”
― Lisa Taddeo, Three Women

“We were both getting what we needed, though I could have done without him. It turned out he could not do without me. He likened his relationship with me to Icarus. He was Icarus and I was the sun. Lines like these, which I wholly believed and still do, made me sick to my stomach. What kind of a girl wants to be a sun over a country she doesn’t even want to visit.”
― Lisa Taddeo, Animal