Zoe Whittall > Quotes

“When I tell her I feel like the other woman, she laughs, that's just learned sexist bullshit. We are all in charge of our own bodies and what we decide to do with them. We are all our own.

I believed it when she said it, like she'd opened up a new valve that had been stuck. I felt unconfined and open-minded and totally confused. Intellectually, non-monogamy made complete sense; emotionally, it felt like sandpaper across my eyelids.”
― Zoe Whittall

“That's creativity in a nutshell. A messy tug-of-war with imagination to erase that feeling that nothing really matters anyway.”
― Zoe Whittall, Holding Still for as Long as Possible

“I am having a quarter-life crisis," I announced to my mother.

"My generation never had those, we just had babies and thought about killing them from time to time.”
― Zoe Whittall, Holding Still for as Long as Possible

“When someone is your husband or father, that’s simply who they are. You don’t stop to question much about them, unless you’re given reason to, and they’d never been given reason to.”
― Zoe Whittall, The Best Kind of People

“Sometimes being an adult doesn't prevent you from making terrible choices”
― Zoe Whittall, The Best Kind of People

“George is essentially a very good person'" Joan said, "But that is one of those meaningless sentences. What is a good person? Under the worst of circumstances, who can say what we would do? For all we know, we might be the worst people on earth.”
― Zoe Whittall, The Best Kind of People

“Compassion- it has its limits”
― Zoe Whittall, The Best Kind of People

“Well, parental control is somewhat illusory, right?”
― Zoe Whittall, The Best Kind of People

“...we shift around on a seesaw moral continuum for our whole lives. Nobody stays the same!”
― Zoe Whittall, The Best Kind of People

“Della & I are drunk at the top of Mont-Royal. We have an open blue plastic thermos of red wine at our feet. It's the first day of spring & it's midnight & we've been peeling off layers of winter all day. We stand facing each other, as if to exchange vows, chests heaving from racing up & down the mountain to the sky. My face is hurting from smiling so much, aching at the edges of my words. She reaches out to hold my face in her hands, dirty palms form a bowl to rest my chin. I’m standing on a tree stump so we’re eye to eye. It’s hard to stay steady. I worry I may start to drool or laugh, I feel so unhinged from my body. It’s been one of those days I don’t want to end. Our goal was to shirk all responsibility merely to enjoy the lack of everyday obligations, to create fullness & purpose out of each other. Our knees are the colour of the ground-in grass. Our boots are caked in mud caskets. Under our nails is a mixture of minerals & organic matter, knuckles scraped by tree bark. We are the thaw embodied.

She says, You have changed me, Eve, you are the single most important person in my life. If you were to leave me, I would die.

At that moment, our breath circling from my lungs & into hers, I am changed. Perhaps before this I could describe our relationship as an experiment, a happy accident, but this was irrefutable. I was completely consumed & consuming. It was as though we created some sort of object between us that we could see & almost hold. I would risk everything I’ve ever known to know only this. I wanted to honour her in a way that was understandable to every part of me. It was as though I could distill the meaning of us into something I could pour into a porcelain cup. Our bodies on top of this city, rulers of love.

Originally, we were celebrating the fact that I got into Concordia’s visual arts program. But the congratulatory brunch she took me to at Café Santropol had turned into wine, which had turned into a day for declarations. I had a sense of spring in my body, that this season would meld into summer like a running-jump movie kiss. There would be days & days like this. XXXX gone away on a sojurn I didn’t care to note the details of, she simply ceased to be. Summer in Montreal in love is almost too much emotion to hold in an open mouth, it spills over, it causes me to not need any sleep. I don’t think I will ever feel as awake as I did in the summer of 1995.”
― Zoe Whittall, Bottle Rocket Hearts

“These kids have no innocence anymore”
― Zoe Whittall, The Best Kind of People

“..the feeling of being ugly in the body that is probably the most beautiful you will ever have”
― Zoe Whittall, The Best Kind of People

“It’s so aggravating the way people assume that just because I like having sex with some people, it means I like having sex with all people.”
― Zoe Whittall, The Spectacular: A Novel

“I was attracted to girly boys and boyish girls, or girls who later became boys. Boy were always going to be part of the equation.”
― Zoe Whittall, Bottle Rocket Hearts

“It felt like the times were good, like we were remembering a time before Rachel died, even though things were never this good then, because they were just normal, and ordinary is never the kind if good you remember.”
― Zoe Whittall, Bottle Rocket Hearts

“What does it mean, if it was the most fulfilling relationship I’ve ever had, and it was a lie?”
― Zoe Whittall, The Best Kind of People

“There are worse things than telling a lie.”
― Zoe Whittall, The Fake

“Imagine the person you love and trust becoming a different person overnight. What would you do?”
― Zoe Whittall, The Best Kind of People

“If this were a chapter in your memoir, wouldn't future you want you to go?”
― Zoe Whittall, The Fake