Rebecca Novack > Quotes

“Ronald Regan made murder illegal?” I said. “Executive Order 12333 says ‘no person employed by or acting on behalf of the United States government shall engage in, or conspire to engage in, assassination.”
― Rebecca Novack, Murder Bimbo

“I had to imagine not only that she would be reading the story but that she would be lifting it up, examining it from all sides, taking it apart and putting it back together. It couldn’t be a picture of a machine, it had to be a functional machine.”
― Rebecca Novack, Murder Bimbo

“And on the days when I feel sad about them, I still remember that it was you who told me that was okay and normal. You can feel grief for people without needing to reconnect with them.”
― Rebecca Novack, Murder Bimbo

“There are so many silky influencers these days lecturing on manifesting a new life. But I did all this the old-fashioned way. I took a long, hard look at my talents and network and asked myself how I could combine these matrices into a brand-new, better life.”
― Rebecca Novack, Murder Bimbo

“One day the people will remember us as grandmothers of change.”
― Rebecca Novack, Murder Bimbo

“I noticed for the first time that all these service jobs were flush with kids in their early twenties, speckled with oddballs in their thirties and forties, and managed by lifelong smokers in their fifties.”
― Rebecca Novack, Murder Bimbo

“What you taught me, or encouraged me to teach myself, was a whole world of theory. You translated language I thought was too complicated. I was afraid of using words I didn’t fully understand, phrases from Marxists, critical race theorists, psychoanalytic writers, feminist scholars, queer theorists. You showed me that none of the terms were unnecessarily complex, none were meant to be exclusionary. It was the opposite. They were big, intricate phrases for big, intricate concepts. They captured multivalent ambivalences, intersecting oppressions, cognitive dissonances. Once you knew how to use them, you could move big ideas around, negotiate with them, explain your circumstance, make sense of a violent world.”
― Rebecca Novack, Murder Bimbo

“I thought sending the first email would make me feel a little better. I thought this was going to be like carrying a whole lot of luggage. You start to feel better as soon as you put things down. Instead, it’s like moving. You pack and carry boxes, furniture, knickknacks. And no matter how little stuff you think you own, no matter how much of the moving you’ve already done, it doesn’t feel like you make any progress at all until you’re completely done.”
― Rebecca Novack, Murder Bimbo

“When you have the kind of love where you see each other for who you really are, the beholding is a kind of technology that counteracts the violence the world perpetrates against you.”
― Rebecca Novack, Murder Bimbo

“I don’t need to tell you how much I love money. I like to spend it, but I love to have it. I wish I could Scrooge McDuck into a pool of gold. This remains my embarrassing vice, the bruise on my Marxist cred. I’ve stopped trying to figure out whether it’s a contradiction to my politics or just a symptom of capitalism’s pernicious fingers in my psyche. I just like it. Sometimes I try to make myself feel better by imagining how I would redistribute my wealth, or the amount of good, necessary shit I could fund. There’s a role for a pool of gold in the revolution!”
― Rebecca Novack, Murder Bimbo