Alissa Nutting > Quotes

“I found that sometimes it was a relief to do something unattractive in private, to confirm that I’m deeply flawed when so many others imagine me to be perfect. People are often startled by my handwriting; because I’m pretty, they assume everything I do is pretty. It’s odd to them that I write like I have a hook for an arm, just as Ford would be startled to learn I have a hook for a heart.”
― Alissa Nutting, Tampa

“His eyes took in the details of my body with a conflicted gaze that I knew well: even having seen all the facts of the case, he still wanted me. He wanted me despite knowing what that meant about him.”
― Alissa Nutting, Tampa

“I was like a turd inside someone who'd accidentally swallowed an engagement ring: I was nothing, yet I carried something uniquely special.”
― Alissa Nutting, Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls

“Do you know how when people are really hungry they will be driven to eat the inedible? Grass and soil and the like? That also happens with love. If you want love badly enough, you will start gobbling harmful substitutes like attention and possessions.”
― Alissa Nutting, Made for Love

“Like most pronounced flaws, it did not live in isolation.”
― Alissa Nutting, Tampa

“Despite being told he could step down, Jack stayed for a moment,crying, then looked over at me. It wasn't at all the look of hatred I'd expected. Instead it was a look of mutual knowledge, Jack conveying to me his new understanding that the world could be a terrible place. His eyes said that no one at all was looking out for him or able to fix this essential flaw in life's fabric; my eyes stared back and told him that he was right.”
― Alissa Nutting, Tampa

“There was something repulsive (and revealing) about talking on a cell phone while handling garbage. Why did anyone pretend human relationships had value?”
― Alissa Nutting, Tampa

“When had she so internalized the feeling that if something wasn’t great she needed to bridge the gap between reality and idealism with her own manufactured enthusiasm? Her enthusiasm was like one of those faux snow machines at a ski resort. For most of her life it had been churning out synthetic delight. It had basically forgotten the original recipe.”
― Alissa Nutting, Made for Love

“My attorney rubbed his hand across his mustache and the corners of his lips several times, as though the allegation was a piece of cake he’d just eaten that had deposited crumbs all over his mouth.”
― Alissa Nutting, Tampa

“A lot of people who know about the view from the tip-top of a bridge or tall building are dead, because they climbed up in order to jump off. But sometimes I wonder if they truly planned on jumping or if the view was just so beautiful that they realized what a wide big net beauty is, and then wanted so badly to be caught by it.”
― Alissa Nutting, Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls

“Melted cheese is a culinary veil...a foxhole where mediocrity can hide.”
― Alissa Nutting, Made for Love

“Sex struck me as a seafood with the shortest imaginable shelf life needing to be peeled and eaten the moment the urge ripened.”
― Alissa Nutting, Tampa

“I won't tell," he said, his arms holding my waist with amateur stiffness. I smiled, thinking about the lover he'd become and all the things he'd try with me for the very first time. I'd be the sexual yardstick for his whole life: Jack would spend the rest of his days trying but failing to relive the experience of being given everything at a time when he knew nothing. Like a tollbooth in his memory, every partner he'd have afterwards would have to pass through the gate of my comparison, and it would be a losing equation. The numbers could never be as favorable as they were right now, when his naivety would be subtracted from my experience to produce the largest sum of astonishment possible.”
― Alissa Nutting, Tampa

“ennui”
― Alissa Nutting, Tampa

“The numbers could never be as favorable as they were right now, when his naiveté would be subtracted from my expertise to produce the largest sum of astonishment possible.”
― Alissa Nutting, Tampa

“She often pictured her sadness as an IV cart she had to wheel everywhere she went, its bag dripping a heavy fluid that was keeping her sick instead of making her better.”
― Alissa Nutting, Made for Love

“The screams echoing through Janet's class were hard to bear. She was attempting a lecture on the Treaty of Paris while Mrs. Pachenko walked between the rows of desks insisting upon calm, raising a finger to her lips and whispering to individual students to please sit all the way down in their desks. In the back of the of the room, several kids were cheering as one of them, a young man whose shirt bore a flaming skull, stood hunched atop his desk like a motocross biker, sliding it forward in small hops. Students appear enthusiastic and are communicating well together, I wrote on the evaluation form.”
― Alissa Nutting, Tampa

“When you’re a ghost, not haunting is like trying not to laugh. It tickles and pushes until it hurts. Of course there are a lot of boring ghosts who find it easy not to haunt. In the afterlife, so much is boring.”
― Alissa Nutting, Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls: Breathtakingly Surreal Feminist Short Stories – Dark Comedy

“If she’d been smart enough to say, Your money is tempting but wow are you strange; I am too but let me just add that something does not feel right here. Something feels aggressively odd on a next-level realm I had not previously imagined, in terms of foreboding discomfort.”
― Alissa Nutting, Made for Love

“It was nice to hear someone familiar. 'How have you been?' Hazel cleared her throat. 'So I need to start networking a little, as they say. Do you have the phone number of anyone who might be looking to hire some help?'

'I don't have a phone,' Liver answered.

Hazel felt her pulse speed up.

'No phone? Of any kind?' Her voice was nearly cracking with excitement. 'So how do people get ahold of you? Your family? Your friends?'

'I've succumbed to neither affliction,' he answered.

'What about women?' she asked, admittedly changing her voice to be a little flirtatious. Hazel decided she'd misjudged him. Anyone getting through life without a phone had skills she wanted to acquire. Rare capabilities that attracted the new Hazel.

'I just meet women in this bar. Mainly they use me to help them reach bottom. I'm like a brick they grab onto midair. Sleeping with me helps them admit their lives have become unmanageable. They realize they want and deserve something more, and then their recovery process can begin. I get laid in the meantime. Win-win.”
― Alissa Nutting, Made for Love

“Aliens struck me as being rather goth. Luckily, in the daylight, there could be no more effective goth repellent than our home’s hideous furnishings. We had 1970s green and yellow linoleum floors. Neon orange and brown, scratchy, wool plaid furniture. And on the living room wall, a huge, earnest painting of two raccoons someone had made while serving a prison sentence.”
― Alissa Nutting, Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls: Breathtakingly Surreal Feminist Short Stories – Dark Comedy

“He seemed to understand that resolution didn’t need to have anything to do with truth, and to choose a sense of harmony over insight every time. I”
― Alissa Nutting, Tampa

“Hazel sometimes had a fantasy daydream at school where the teacher walked into the classroom and yelled,

ISN’T EVERYTHING HORRIBLE? DOESN’T THE PAIN OF THE WORLD OUTWEIGH THE JOY BY TRILLIONS? WOULD YOU LIKE TO PUSH ALL OF THE DESKS INTO THE CENTER OF THE ROOM AND BURN THEM IN A GIANT BONFIRE? THEN WE CAN RUN AROUND SCREAMING AND WEEPING AMIDST THE SMOKE IN A TRUTHFUL PARADE OF OUR HUMAN CONDITION. SINCE YOU ARE SMALL STATURED, CHILDREN, IT MIGHT HELP OTHERS TO FEEL THE FULL BRUNT OF YOUR AGITATION IF YOU WAVE STICKS AND SHRUBBERY OVER YOUR HEADS ALL THE WHILE. WE DON’T WANT TO KILL ANYTHING WE DON’T HAVE TO KILL; EVERYTHING LIVING THAT WE’VE EVER SEEN OR KNOWN WILL DIE WITHOUT OUR INTERVENTION, OURSELVES INCLUDED; THIS IS A PSYCHOLOGICAL LEAD BLANKET THAT EVEN OUR MOST PERVASIVE MOMENTS OF COMFORT CANNOT CRAWL OUT FROM UNDER AND ONE UNEXTINGUISHABLE SOURCE OF DESPAIR, SO WE WON’T BE PERFORMING ANY RITUALISTIC SACRIFICES; THAT’S NOT THE DIRECTION WE WILL GO IN JUST YET; HOWEVER, ASSISTANT PRINCIPAL LAWRENCE IS ON THE PROWL FOR A ROAD CARCASS WE MIGHT BE ABLE TO USE AS A REPRESENTATIVE PROP BECAUSE NOWHERE IN OUR AUTUMN-THEMED POSTER BOARD DéCOR IS MORBIDITY OR DECAY SYMBOLIZED. OUR SCHOOL BOARD MEMBERS CANNOT AGREE ON HOW BEST TO ACKNOWLEDGE THE BOUNDLESSNESS OF HUMAN CRUELTY. IN OUR SOCIETY SOME OF YOU ARE FAR SAFER AND MORE ADVANTAGED THAN OTHERS; AT HOME SOME OF YOU ARE FAR MORE LOVED; SOME OF YOU WILL FIND THAT CONCEPTS LIKE FAIRNESS AND JUSTICE WILL BE THIN, FLICKERING HOLOGRAMS ON THE PERIPHERY OF YOUR LIVES. OH, LOOK, CHILDREN—I SEE MR. LAWRENCE IN THE DISTANCE DRAGGING A PORTION OF A HIGHWAY-SLAUGHTERED DEER. LET’S GO HELP HIM LUG IT INSIDE AND BE REMINDED THAT WE TOO INHABIT BODIES MADE OF MEAT-WRAPPED BONES; LET’S MEDITATE ON THIS CORPOREAL TERROR.

Whenever her mother had asked, Hazel always told her, School is great.”
― Alissa Nutting, Made for Love

“Do you know what broccoli is like to your body? It is like a hundred-dollar bill. When you eat it, you are paying yourself with health. Do you know what a cookie is like? It is Monopoly money! You’re giving your body fraudulent currency.”
― Alissa Nutting, Made for Love

“Janet stood and began a wide navigation of turning one hundred and eighty degrees to enter her vehicle, her slow toddles calling to mind a sleepwalking badger. Her weak forearms often came alive to shoo away invisible hindrances, pawing the air with disgruntled choler. Before beginning the climb up the van’s two carpeted steps, the most athletic portion of her adieu, she unceremoniously dropped her cigarette butt to the ground without extinguishing it. I got the feeling she hoped it might roll beneath the vehicle’s gas tank and give her a true Viking burial.”
― Alissa Nutting, Tampa

“Aliens struck me as being rather goth.”
― Alissa Nutting, Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls: Breathtakingly Surreal Feminist Short Stories – Dark Comedy

“Or perhaps he was skilled at foreshadowing. I’d imagine a pious avoidance of sin requires that.”
― Alissa Nutting, Tampa

“How can I wear a leather suit that does not carry the stains of wine and blood?" asks CT, and Gustav does not answer; of course it was rhetorical”
― Alissa Nutting, Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls

“Hazel then attempted to break the doll’s head open on the nightstand like a piggy bank, but Diane’s exterior proved to be almost indestructible. This made Hazel realize Diane’s makers had designed her to be able to withstand incredible beatings, which made Hazel sad for humanity.”
― Alissa Nutting, Made for Love

“...occasionally some of the mothers did see fit to bring their young children along to practice the valuable life skill of standing on the side of the road with indignation.”
― Alissa Nutting, Tampa