Jessica Knoll > Quotes

“They will call you hysterical no matter how much dignity you have. So you might as well do whatever the hell you want.”
― Jessica Knoll, Bright Young Women

“Law enforcement would rather we remember a dull man as brilliant than take a good hard look at the role they played in this absolute sideshow, and I am sick to death of watching them in their pressed shirts and cowboy boots, in their comfortable leather interview chairs, in hugely successful and critically acclaimed crime documentaries, talking about the intelligence and charm and wiliness of an ordinary misogynist. This story is not that. The story is not that.”
― Jessica Knoll, Bright Young Women

“Time does not heal all wounds. Grief is just like a sink full of dirty dishes or a pile of soiled laundry. Grief is a chore you have to do and it's a messy one at that.”
― Jessica Knoll, Bright Young Women

“Women got that feeling about him, that funny one we all get when we know something isn't right, but we don't know how to politely extricate ourselves from the situation without escalating the threat of violence or harassment. That is not a skill women are taught, the same way men are not taught that it is okay to leave a woman alone if what she wants is to be left alone.”
― Jessica Knoll, Bright Young Women

“Moving on doesn’t mean you don’t talk about it. Or hurt about it. It’s always going to hurt,”
― Jessica Knoll, Luckiest Girl Alive

“There were men who cracked their knuckles while divulging to me what they would do to the defendant if they got the chance, thinking this was somehow reassuring for me to hear. But all it did was make me realize that there wasn't so big a difference between the man who brutalized Denise and half the men I passed every day on the street.”
― Jessica Knoll, Bright Young Women

“I've tried to make sense of how someone who didn't stalk his victims in advance ended up going after the best and the brightest. And I think that's it, the thing they all had in common - a light that outshone his. He targets college campuses and sorority houses because he's looking for the cream of the crop. He wants to extinguish us - we are the ones who remind him that he's not that smart, not that good-looking, and there's nothing particularly special about him.”
― Jessica Knoll, Bright Young Women

“anger in women is treated as a character disorder, as a problem to be solved, when oftentimes it is entirely appropriate, given the circumstances that trigger it.”
― Jessica Knoll, Bright Young Women

“All my life, I’ve found it difficult to advocate for myself, to ask for what I want. I fear burdening people so much.”
― Jessica Knoll, Luckiest Girl Alive

“My favorite strategy is to feign inferiority and encourage my enemy’s arrogance.”
― Jessica Knoll, Luckiest Girl Alive

“Sometimes I feel like a windup doll, like I have to reach behind and turn my golden key to produce a greeting, a laugh, whatever the socially acceptable reaction should be.”
― Jessica Knoll, Luckiest Girl Alive

“I have faith, because nature is the very best example of integration. Things grow differently when they’re damaged, showing us how to occupy strange new ground to bloom red instead of green. We can be found, brighter than before.”
― Jessica Knoll, Bright Young Women

“There is something about seeing someone from behind, something about the way people walk away, that I've always found unnervingly intimate. Maybe it's because the back of the body isn't on guard the way the front is - the slouch of the shoulders and the flex in the back muscles, that's the most honest you'll ever see a person.”
― Jessica Knoll, Luckiest Girl Alive

“Right here, right now, I want you to forget two things: he was nothing special, and what happened was not random.”
― Jessica Knoll, Bright Young Women

“But faith doesn’t mean that to me anymore. Now it means someone seeing something in you that you don’t, and not giving up until you see it too.”
― Jessica Knoll, Luckiest Girl Alive

“By the end of it all I just assumed no one ever told the truth, and that was when I started lying too.”
― Jessica Knoll, Luckiest Girl Alive

“It is a dangerous thing to conflate feminism with liking all women. It limits women to being one thing, likable, when feminism is about allowing women to be all shades of all things, even if that thing is a snake oil saleswoman.”
― Jessica Knoll, The Favorite Sister

“life is ten percent what happens to you and ninety percent how you react to it.”
― Jessica Knoll, Bright Young Women

“I thought that by twenty-eight I could stop trying to prove myself and relax already. But this fight just gets bloodier with age.”
― Jessica Knoll, Luckiest Girl Alive

“Old souls are just people who had to fend for themselves ahead of their time.”
― Jessica Knoll, Bright Young Women

“It was one of those awful moments where you have no control over your reaction, when the pain is too exposed to hide.”
― Jessica Knoll, Luckiest Girl Alive

“This is Luke’s favorite thing to say about me, to remind me. I’m a survivor. It’s the finality of the word that bothers me, its assuming implication. Survivors should move on. Should wear white wedding dresses and carry peonies down the aisle and overcome, rather than dwell in a past that can’t be altered. The word dismisses something I cannot, will not, dismiss.”
― Jessica Knoll, Luckiest Girl Alive

“Things grow differently when they’re damaged, showing us how to occupy strange new ground to bloom red instead of green. We can be found, brighter than before.”
― Jessica Knoll, Bright Young Women

“That would be the most surprising lesson I’d learn at Bradley: You only scream when you’re finally safe.”
― Jessica Knoll, Luckiest Girl Alive

“The thinking that women of all shapes and sizes can be beautiful is still hugely problematic, because it is predicated on the idea that the most important thing a woman has to offer the world is her appearance. Men are raised to worry about their legacies, not their upper arm and thigh fat, stretch marks, crows-feet, saggy elbows, ugly armpits, thin eyelashes, and normal-smelling genitals.”
― Jessica Knoll, The Favorite Sister

“The truth is something people will go to great lengths to keep for themselves. It shouldn't feel like a gift when you get it, but it is.”
― Jessica Knoll, Bright Young Women

“The Defendant did not like to be told what to do and when to do it and once jammed his jail cell keyhole with toilet paper so the guards couldn’t get in when they arrived to escort him to his arraignment. For this he was called cunning and clever, though I had a dog who also tore up toilet paper when he didn’t get enough attention”
― Jessica Knoll, Bright Young Women

“Maybe he wouldn’t fear my bite, my kookiness, maybe he’d get past my thorny bristles to see there is sweetness here. Would understand that moving on doesn’t mean never talking about it, never crying about it.”
― Jessica Knoll, Luckiest Girl Alive

“At one point I was climbing off the bus and I bumped into a woman in a crisp black blazer and pointy, witchy shoes. She had a bulky cell phone pressed against her ear and a black bag with gold Prada lettering hooked around her wrist. I was a long ways off from worshiping at the Céline, Chloé, or Goyard thrones, but I certainly recognized Prada. “Sorry,” I said, and took a step away from her. She nodded at me briskly but never stopped speaking into her phone, “The samples need to be there by Friday.” As her heels snapped away on the pavement, I thought, There is no way that woman can ever get hurt. She had more important things to worry about than whether or not she would have to eat lunch alone. The samples had to arrive by Friday. And as I thought about all the other things that must make up her busy, important life, the cocktail parties and the sessions with the personal trainer and the shopping for crisp, Egyptian cotton sheets, there it started, my concrete and skyscraper wanderlust. I saw how there was a protection in success, and success was defined by threatening the minion on the other end of a cell phone, expensive pumps terrorizing the city, people stepping out of your way simply because you looked like you had more important places to be than they did. Somewhere along the way, a man got tangled up in this definition too. I just had to get to that, I decided, and no one could hurt me again.”
― Jessica Knoll, Luckiest Girl Alive

“Give me twenty minutes alone in a room with him,” Brian agreed, in a ravenous, juicy way that churned my stomach. This became something of a Rorschach test over the years. There were men who cracked their knuckles while divulging to me what they would do to The Defendant if they got the chance, thinking this was somehow reassuring for me to hear. But all it did was make me realize that there wasn’t so big a difference between the man who’d brutalized Denise and half the men I passed every day on the street.”
― Jessica Knoll, Bright Young Women