May > May's Quotes

“The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference. The opposite of art is not ugliness, it's indifference. The opposite of faith is not heresy, it's indifference. And the opposite of life is not death, it's indifference.”
― Elie Wiesel

“Perhaps when we find ourselves wanting everything, it is because we are dangerously close to wanting nothing.”
― sylvia plath

“We should meet in another life, we should meet in air, me and you.”
― Sylvia Plath

“The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“Oh, sleep. Nothing else could ever bring me such pleasure, such freedom, the power to feel and move and think and imagine, safe from the miseries of my waking consciousness.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation

“People truly engaged in life have messy houses.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, Eileen

“in my frenzied state of despair, I understood: there was stability in living in the past.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation

“I couldn't be bothered to deal with fixing things. I preferred to wallow in the problem, dream of better days.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, Eileen

“Maybe they understood, in fact, that beauty and meaning had nothing to do with one another.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation

“Idealism without consequences is the pathetic dream of every spoiled brat, I suppose.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, Eileen

“that love was a
distinctly human defect which God had created to counterbalance the power
of human greed.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, Lapvona

“I rebelled in silent ways, with my thoughts.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation

“When God gives you more than you can tolerate, you turn to instinct. And instinct is a force beyond anyone’s control.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, Lapvona

“Those people with perfect houses are simply obsessed with death. A house that is so well maintained, furnished with good-looking furniture of high quality, decorated tastefully, everything in its place, becomes a living tomb. People truly engaged in life have messy houses.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, Eileen

“We pretend to want things we don't want so nobody can see us not getting what we need.”
― Lisa Taddeo, Three Women

“Throughout history, men have broken women’s hearts in a particular way. They love them or half-love them and then grow weary and spend weeks and months extricating themselves soundlessly, pulling their tails back into their doorways, drying themselves off, and never calling again. Meanwhile, women wait. The more in love they are and the fewer options they have, the longer they wait, hoping that he will return with a smashed phone, with a smashed face, and say, I’m sorry, I was buried alive and the only thing I thought of was you, and feared that you would think I’d forsaken you when the truth is only that I lost your number, it was stolen from me by the men who buried me alive, and I’ve spent three years looking in phone books and now I have found you. I didn’t disappear, everything I felt didn’t just leave. You were right to know that would be cruel, unconscionable, impossible. Marry me.”
― Lisa Taddeo, Three Women

“May you not go around the world looking to fill what you fear you lack with the flesh of another human being.”
― Lisa Taddeo, Animal

“When someone suffocates you with what they believe is love, even as you feel your air supply being cut off, you at least feel embraced.”
― Lisa Taddeo, Animal

“She said women are considered strong these days only if they didn’t talk about things they loved that didn’t love them, if they didn’t get hurt or allow themselves to be occasionally humiliated at their own hands, when, really, strength was being unashamed to want what you want.”
― Lisa Taddeo, Animal

“It's the nuances of desire that hold the truth of who we are at our rawest moments. I set out to register the heat and sting of female want so that men and other women might more easily comprehend before they condemn. Because it's the quotidian moments of our lives that will go on forever, that will tell us who we were, who our neighbors and our mothers were, when we were too diligent in thinking they were nothing like us. This is the story of three women.”
― Lisa Taddeo, Three Women

“Men were always putting their coats around my shoulders. They mark their territory that way. It’s better to freeze to death.”
― Lisa Taddeo, Animal

“Let me tell you: men love cruelty. It reminds them of every time their fathers or mothers didn’t think they were good enough. Cruelty looks better on a woman than the perfect dress.”
― Lisa Taddeo, Animal

“My mother never spoke about what she wanted. About what turned her on or off. Sometimes it seemed that she didn't have any desires of her own. That her sexuality was merely a trail in the woods, the unmarked kind that is made by boots trampling tall grass. And the boots belonged to my father.”
― Lisa Taddeo, Three Women

“I don’t want you to continue the cycle of hate. I’ve been called a whore. I’ve been judged not only by the things I have done unto others but cruelly, by the things that happened to me. I envy the people who judge me. Those who live their lives in a neat predictable manner. The right college, the right house, the right time to move to a bigger one. The prescribed number of children, which sometimes is two and other times is three I would bet most of the people had not been through one percent of what I have.”
― Lisa Taddeo, Animal

“All present men are stand-ins for former men. And all men are stand-ins for our fathers. And even our fathers mean less than our own self-preservation. May you not go around the world looking to fill what you fear you lack with the flesh of another human.”
― Lisa Taddeo, Animal

“There is so much power in the way we obsess. If we could only harness it. If we could only redirect it.”
― Lisa Taddeo, Animal

“Somehow, because of how much warmer my father was on the whole, I think I metabolized it to mean that men can ruin you in wonderful ways, like lurid, bright jawbreakers with beautiful rainbow specks.”
― Lisa Taddeo, Animal

“But it's not the man's fault. The man is nothing. It's what you think you are missing inside of yourself. I promise that you are missing nothing.”
― Lisa Taddeo, Animal

“I can tell you a lot about sex with a man to whom you are not attracted. It becomes all about your own performance…while it was happening I wasn’t aware of how it was affecting me. I didn’t notice until several years later, when three showers a day were not enough”
― Lisa Taddeo, Animal

“The thing I didn't expect was telling her about me would force me to look at myself, at the way I craved the love of men who would never love me. At the way I could not abide women who needed me. At the way I destroyed some while allowing others to destroy me. I felt sick with myself and, at the same time, unburdened. I thought I'd been honest with myself. But I hadn't. I'd been telling myself ghost stories my whole life.”
― Lisa Taddeo, Animal