Nat Cassidy > Quotes

“If you knew how much anger I had in me you’d say Thank God she’s not a man She might destroy millions Thank God the only person she has the power to destroy Is herself”
― Nat Cassidy, Mary: An Awakening of Terror

“Abuse is its own kind of reincarnation, isn’t it? We become the ones who made us.”
― Nat Cassidy, Mary: An Awakening of Terror

“Oh yeah I'm always scared of stuff. You get to a certain age and they stop calling it scared and start calling it anxiety.”
― Nat Cassidy, When the Wolf Comes Home

“Grief is the space between two states of being: who you were and who you are.”
― Nat Cassidy, Nestlings

“For all her grumbling, she actually loves being a woman, pains and all. She just wishes she’d been born into a world that let those pains earn a little goddamn space.”
― Nat Cassidy, Mary: An Awakening of Terror

“The truth is, nowadays, mass shootings are so common they’re more useful to bury attention than gain it. You could basically call any massacre a mass shooting, and within a day or two, most Americans will have digested it and shit it out without so much as a faint aftertaste. It’s like money laundering but for slaughter.”
― Nat Cassidy, When the Wolf Comes Home

“Love is a shape-shifting monster, she thinks, dizzy and horrified and exhausted and devastated. A werewolf with a bottomless stomach.”
― Nat Cassidy, When the Wolf Comes Home

“I think Healing begins when you finally recognize there is no moving on. Only moving forward. You don’t actually leave anything behind. You carry it with you.”
― Nat Cassidy, Nestlings

“But, more than that, my mom knew the value of horror as a genre. She knew there were distinct benefits to be gained by spending time with our fears, getting to know them personally.”
― Nat Cassidy, Mary: An Awakening of Terror

“Boys get to keep that confidence [as they age], I think; girls have to give it back like it never really belonged to them.”
― Nat Cassidy, Mary

“Who am I? I am just a story written in present tense. We all are. We are never finished.”
― Nat Cassidy, Mary: An Awakening of Terror

“There’s so much suffering in the world. So much pain. You get to be a certain age and you gain a collector’s appreciation of it.”
― Nat Cassidy, Nestlings

“When I was a little girl my uncle
Was a veterinarian
And I was a little girl who loved animals
I had a cat and a dog

And once I asked my uncle (who was a veterinarian)
Why does my dog love belly rubs
But they make my cat attack?
I showed him scratches up and down my arms.

He said the thing about cats you have to understand Is they are predator and prey
They can hunt and pounce and kill
But they’re small and light and probably
Delicious
So they take some things very very seriously

I was a little girl when he said this
But when I became a woman in this world
I understood what he meant.”
― Nat Cassidy , Mary

“Trauma’s trauma, but I think some people are still just born assholes.”
― Nat Cassidy, Rest Stop

“Adulthood was all about compromises, wasn’t it? You decide what you need, what you want, and shift your priorities around until you find the least bad combination. Each compromise was a link in a chain, and if that chain dragged you down to the bottom of the East River? Well … at least you had Netflix and Spotify to distract you while you sank.”
― Nat Cassidy, Nestlings

“Besides, you know another word for unique? Crazy. I hate that word. As far as I’m concerned, it’s the worst word you can call a woman. No other C-word comes close.”
― Nat Cassidy, Mary: An Awakening of Terror

“No one will be spared when the wolf comes home.”
― Nat Cassidy, When the Wolf Comes Home

“A garden of resentment was sown that day. Its hideous plants bloomed at irregular, unpredictable intervals. A sprig of hate. A blossom of blame. Entire teeming hedgerows of depression and alienation.”
― Nat Cassidy, Nestlings

“You want things so badly, but I think one of the things you want is to never have to fight for the other things you want, and that makes it impossible to, y'know, have those other things! It's not even a vicious circle, man. It's a stupid circle.”
― Nat Cassidy, Rest Stop

“It’s always the quiet ones,” the cliché goes. And like many clichés, there’s some truth to it. But sometimes I wonder: what comes first? Do those “quiet ones” become capable of committing an atrocity because they’re shunned? Or are they shunned because there’s already a sense of what they’re capable of? —Special Agent Peter Arliss, In the Dark with the Devil: One Heroic FBI Agent’s Ground Zero Account of the Arroyo Easter Massacre”
― Nat Cassidy, Mary: An Awakening of Terror

“Haven’t you noticed by now? Just because something’s impossible doesn’t mean it’s not real.”
― Nat Cassidy, When the Wolf Comes Home

“Because the past is like the moon, isn’t it? It’s always there, but it shifts, it’s never the same when you revisit it.”
― Nat Cassidy, Mary: An Awakening of Terror

“Conspiracy theories are basically just fairy tales for adults, aren’t they?”
― Nat Cassidy, When the Wolf Comes Home

“mothers can handle a lot of sensations at once, can’t they? It’s part of the job: to be torn open and persevere.”
― Nat Cassidy, Nestlings

“The only way to prove you haven’t served your use is to endeavor to stay as useful as possible, even to a system that hates you.”
― Nat Cassidy, Mary: An Awakening of Terror

“Is that possible? To live in this world and not scare yourself to death? To feel turbulence and not imagine the plane going down? To experience hope as a grown-up with the same clarity a child feels terror? How do you not call forth the things that will devour you and give them teeth? How do you protect? Especially when the danger is you?”
― Nat Cassidy, When the Wolf Comes Home

“Yeah, I keep a roll of hundreds up my snatch while I sleep; it’s good for my lower back.”
― Nat Cassidy, Mary: An Awakening of Terror

“Just because it’s in your head doesn’t mean it’s not real,”
― Nat Cassidy, Mary: An Awakening of Terror

“We’re all just biding our time before we break, aren’t we? This is just the rest stop.”
― Nat Cassidy, Rest Stop

“Our parents define so many things, she thinks. Love. Hate. Fear. Provider. Abuser. Abandoner. Monster. Mirror. They metamorphose. They mutate. They change. They are fairy tales with inscrutable illustrations.”
― Nat Cassidy, When the Wolf Comes Home