Rebecca Woolf > Quotes

“Advice to friends. Advice to fellow mothers in the same boat. "How do you do it all?" Crack a joke. Make it seem easy. Make everything seem easy. Make life seem easy and parenthood and marriage and freelancing for pennies, writing a novel and smiling after a rejection, keeping the faith after two, reminding oneself that four years of work counted for a lot, counted for everything. Make the bed. Make it nice. Make the people laugh when you sit down to write and if you can't make them laugh make them cry. Make them want to hug you or hold you or punch you in the face. Make them want to kill you or fuck you or be your friend. Make them change. Make them happy. Make the baby smile. Make him laugh. Make him dinner. Make him proud.

Hold the phone, someone is on the other line. She says its important. People are dying. Children. Friends. Press mute because there is nothing you can say. Press off because you're running out of minutes. Running out of time. Soon he'll be grown up and you'll regret the time you spent pushing him away for one more paragraph in the manuscript no one will ever read. Put down the book, the computer, the ideas. Remember who you are now. Wait. Remember who you were. Wait. Remember what's important. Make a list. Ten things, no twenty. Twenty thousand things you want to do before you die but what if tomorrow never comes? No one will remember. No one will know. No one will laugh or cry or make the bed. No one will have a clue which songs to sing to the baby. No one will be there for the children. No one will finish the first draft of the novel. No one will publish the one that's been finished for months. No one will remember the thought you had last night, that great idea you forgot to write down.”
― Rebecca Woolf

“Thus far the mighty mystery of motherhood is this: How is it that doing it all feels like nothing is ever getting done.”
― Rebecca Woolf

“What if we all spoke truthfully about our feelings and experiences? What if we weren’t afraid of being chastised for our humanity? What if, we felt safe enough to open the parts of ourselves we have been culturally conditioned to keep closed—didn’t have to call each other brave for saying the things we know to be true, and instead of protecting our families from knowing our pain, allowed them to understand what we risk by saying nothing. So many of us say nothing. Raise our daughters to say nothing. Send the message to our sons, that no matter what they do to us—we will say nothing.”
― Rebecca Woolf, All of This: A Memoir of Death and Desire

“A woman unlearning is the most powerful kind.”
― Rebecca Woolf, All of This: A Memoir of Death and Desire

“There is something godlike about these moments of release, the irrefutable power of a seizure-like breakdown that ends in holy silence—the falling apart a catalyst for rearrangement.”
― Rebecca Woolf, All of This: A Memoir of Death and Desire

“I think many women are like me. We have been brainwashed to feel so ashamed of our truths that we lie in order to live. About who we love and how. About the kind of love we want in return. We have been lying as a way to preserve ourselves since the beginning of time. So when we tell each other to be honest—woman to woman—what we are really saying is . . . it’s okay. You can tell me your secrets. You can share with me how you stay sane. You can tell me how you lie.”
― Rebecca Woolf, All of This: A Memoir of Death and Desire

“Caretakers have nowhere to put their anger, that’s why.”
― Rebecca Woolf, All of This: A Memoir of Death and Desire

“I pointed my fingers in his face and listed every instance he did something with or to my body without my consent. For years, I woke up to him inside me, opened my eyes and stared blankly at the wall until he finished, rocking back and forth like an empty canoe. He would roll over after while I stayed awake, sticky against the sheets until the discomfort became too much and I had to climb out of bed to clean myself in the bathroom. Two hours later, I was there, again, in the same bathroom, shadows tucked neatly beneath my eyes. Voice like an alarm reminding my kids to get up, get ready for school.”
― Rebecca Woolf, All of This: A Memoir of Death and Desire

“Nobody talks about what grief feels like when the person you’re mourning is someone you had, for years, been preparing to lose in a different way. That a relationship after someone is dead is no less complicated than a relationship with someone who is living. It’s okay to miss and mourn someone but also to feel relief that the suffering is over. In all aspects.”
― Rebecca Woolf, All of This: A Memoir of Death and Desire

“How does a mother bring a daughter into the world without wanting to change it?”
― Rebecca Woolf, All of This: A Memoir of Death and Desire

“Men are called brave for so much less.”
― Rebecca Woolf, All of This: A Memoir of Death and Desire

“This is what home feels like for me. Like revisiting a foreign country where you can now speak the language, I am back where I started, but this time I know how to communicate my needs. How to prioritize my pleasure. How to walk away from the kind of men who will never deserve my love and also the ones who do.”
― Rebecca Woolf, All of This: A Memoir of Death and Desire

“Shortly after midnight, I whispered all the things I could think of that a person would want to hear before they die. And then I pulled Hal’s chest toward mine and squeezed, an embrace that reminded me of the first time we ever put our bodies next to each other. When the flesh said yes before the mouth did.”
― Rebecca Woolf, All of This: A Memoir of Death and Desire

“As a teenager, I was the cool girl. Not because I was cool, but because I let the boys do whatever they wanted and thanked them for it. They could talk shit about girls in front of me and do things to my body and ask me for favors and I always said yes and like, totally, for sure. I cooked and cleaned and drove them around in a car I filled with my own gas money. I was the hole in which to bury secrets, desires. I was free therapy. A sex worker who didn’t need to be paid. Worse, there were many times—too many to count—when I paid them. “Oh, you’re low on money? No problem. This one’s on me.”
― Rebecca Woolf, All of This: A Memoir of Death and Desire

“Money, they say, is the number one cause for divorce but, for us, it was more about the inequity, the imbalance—what happens when one person is able to follow her dreams and the other is not.”
― Rebecca Woolf, All of This: A Memoir of Death and Desire

“What if one day the kids ask about the trees and want to grow them on their father’s behalf? What if they ask for artifacts of their father’s dying and death and I have to tell them I threw them all away? What if, instead of the closure they never received through their father’s passing, they find it in his copy of Rear Window or The Birds? That would have been me, I think. Collaging together all the clues. Who was my dad if not for the tangible items he left behind? Why else would he have purchased so many seemingly random items only to leave them unopened? Unwrapped? Perhaps these were his last words to his children.”
― Rebecca Woolf, All of This: A Memoir of Death and Desire

“We found out Hal’s cancer was the bad one. The you-probably-will-die-before-the-year-is-over one. There would be no Whipple procedure. No surgical removal of any tumors, liver or otherwise. There was only the option of chemo treatments, which probably killed him faster, if you want to know the truth. But he wanted to do them anyway. The doctors said it might help, so he said yes and he said yes and he said yes. “Whatever will give me more time.” Desperation is why people steal.”
― Rebecca Woolf, All of This: A Memoir of Death and Desire

“Suddenly everything I had written off as okay was being recognized for what it was: assault, abuse, coercion. It wasn’t okay for a friend’s older brother to molest me in my sleep when I was twelve. It wasn’t okay to go on what was supposed to be an innocent walk in the woods only to be slammed against a picnic table, my “virginity” stolen from me under a blanket of stars. When you are used to being treated a certain way, it is hard to know what is and isn’t wrong. And besides, wasn’t I protecting myself by keeping the men in my life pacified? If I just let them . . . they wouldn’t be angry or feel hurt or embarrassed. If I said yes instead of no, I could just leave when it was over and never come back.”
― Rebecca Woolf, All of This: A Memoir of Death and Desire

“I don’t want any of this stuff in my house but, also, how could I possibly throw it away? What if he comes back, I keep asking myself. Shhhhh, I know, I know. But, like, what if . . .”
― Rebecca Woolf, All of This: A Memoir of Death and Desire

“It is an incredibly normal thing to die. Surreal, sure, but only because we have convinced ourselves that our existence is more important than acknowledging our ephemera. Death makes people panic until they’re living against it every day.”
― Rebecca Woolf, All of This: A Memoir of Death and Desire

“Someday, someone will turn a glass bottle in her hands with the same curiosity I have. And it will be my bone dust inside.”
― Rebecca Woolf, All of This: A Memoir of Death and Desire

“I felt like I was going to die. It wasn't just Trump. It was me, too. It was Hal. It was a world of women being eaten alive by men who were repeatedly knighted in spite of bad behavior - women standing by their partners, their femininity a shield for men to be toxic behind.”
― Rebecca Woolf, All of This: A Memoir of Death and Desire

“This was it. The end of our bizarre love language.”
― Rebecca Woolf, All of This: A Memoir of Death and Desire

“Living in proximity to death will either make you more afraid of dying or detached from its heaviness.”
― Rebecca Woolf, All of This: A Memoir of Death and Desire

“She read my words and sent them back oxygenated with her understanding.”
― Rebecca Woolf, All of This: A Memoir of Death and Desire

“The kids had no desire to see grief counselors and, perhaps because I didn’t either, I didn’t push it. Instead, we did what we always did. We drew pictures and played music and lit candles and danced around the house with bare feet singing “Ring Around the Rosie.” We did our own version of familial mourning. We made stuff and burned stuff and cried and laughed and made macabre jokes and decorated the house for Halloween with skeletons and a dozen freshly purchased gravestones. We shopped for plots in the cemetery while blasting haunted-house sound effects on our phones. We sang along to Hal’s favorite songs. We danced in the middle of grocery aisles, life-sized plastic skeletons in our arms. We laughed until we cried until we cried until we laughed and ashes, ashes, we all fall down.”
― Rebecca Woolf, All of This: A Memoir of Death and Desire

“One of the oddest things about death and dying and people getting sick is that everything else stays the same.”
― Rebecca Woolf, All of This: A Memoir of Death and Desire

“I have spent years breaking down over relative nothingness, but in the hallway I become someone else.”
― Rebecca Woolf, All of This: A Memoir of Death and Desire

“Grief is nonlinear. It’s sneaky and sharp, like a serial killer in a movie where there’s no warning. No suspenseful music. No screeching of violins. And one night, when you think you’re fine and everything is fine and oh, look at me living my life—thriving, even—it’s like, BOOM BANG, then suddenly you’re on the floor with no memory of how you got there. Grief put a roofie in your drink and now the room is spinning. Grief is supposed to be a Mack truck but, really, it’s a Prius with its lights off. No way to know it’s coming until you are under its wheels.”
― Rebecca Woolf, All of This: A Memoir of Death and Desire

“In my new home, I will not hide. I will not shrink myself nor prioritize people's pleasure over my own. Never again will I live in discomfort for the comfort of everyone else. Before I am even a mother, I will be me.”
― Rebecca Woolf, All of This: A Memoir of Death and Desire