MJ > MJ's Quotes

“Male fantasies, male fantasies, is everything run by male fantasies? Up on a pedestal or down on your knees, it's all a male fantasy: that you're strong enough to take what they dish out, or else too weak to do anything about it. Even pretending you aren't catering to male fantasies is a male fantasy: pretending you're unseen, pretending you have a life of your own, that you can wash your feet and comb your hair unconscious of the ever-present watcher peering through the keyhole, peering through the keyhole in your own head, if nowhere else. You are a woman with a man inside watching a woman. You are your own voyeur.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Robber Bride

“But who can remember pain, once it’s over? All that remains of it is a shadow, not in the mind even, in the flesh. Pain marks you, but too deep to see. Out of sight, out of mind.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

“You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting –
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.”
― Mary Oliver

“I would take my strange and incapable heart out of my chest if I could, display it, absolve myself of responsibility.”
― Sophie Mackintosh, The Water Cure

“Fear of discovery governed my every thought and step; I hid myself so completely that I live a hair's
breath from suffocation.
Now I was *seen*.”
― Isabel Cañas, The Hacienda

“But if God is the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, if He is three in one in the Trinity, then God knows nothing of loneliness. God knows nothing of standing with his back to a gray morning, of dropping to his knees in the dust.”
― Isabel Cañas, The Hacienda

“Thinking about you is akin to dragging your bloated ghost to shore. And why would we want to keep bringing that back?”
― Sophie Mackintosh, The Water Cure

“It is possible I want it too much, the way I want everything.”
― Sophie Mackintosh, The Water Cure

“Time without our father becomes stretching, soft. Sugar melted in the pan and drawn into something new before hardening, contracting. There are many days which bleed into each other. The sun in the sky seems closer to us all the time.”
― Sophie Mackintosh, The Water Cure

“For a second I remember how your hands looked moving the flint, the flame rising up, and something passes over me. I do not cry. Fuck you, I mouth to the air instead. It makes no reply. Where is your ghost when I need it?”
― Sophie Mackintosh, The Water Cure

“Trauma is a toxin that hooks into our hair and organs and blood and becomes part of us, the way heavy metals do, our bodies nothing more than a layering of flesh around everything ingested and experienced.”
― Sophie Mackintosh, The Water Cure

“The wind was taking the sound away. I would never be able to scream loud enough. I launched my voice with all my force and felt unendurably happy. I had been waiting my whole short life to feel that way.”
― Sophie Mackintosh, The Water Cure

“I love to cry, though. With King gone, I had forgotten to feel guilty about doing it. There is no one left to notice what I do now.”
― Sophie Mackintosh, The Water Cure

“I clutch for his knee, some kind of contact I have control over. I want to hold everything in the world in my arms, hold the universe itself.”
― Sophie Mackintosh, The Water Cure

“...the straps down my shoulders and to settle back, to feel his gaze on me like water, like a thing I deserve.”
― Sophie Mackintosh, The Water Cure

“Everything was so heavy with intention and none of it worked.”
― Sophie Mackintosh, The Water Cure

“My body feels anchoered to his, pointless without his prescence. Eventually he rises and heads inside, and I follow his lead. He sighs. 'Are you my shadow now?'.

I would like that, actually, but I don't tell him so.”
― Sophie Mackintosh, The Water Cure

“...I was jealous, not because of him, but because of what it felt like to be seen. To be known.”
― Sophie Mackintosh, The Water Cure

“The message is *This is no place.* The message is *Fuck you.* We hope they will see him and tell others of the dangerous women who discovered a way to save themselves.”
― Sophie Mackintosh, The Water Cure

“But then isn't that always like a woman, to want to drag every word and sentiment over and over through the wringer, until the meaning is gone. To over-process. To be absolutely sure.”
― Sophie Mackintosh, The Water Cure

“Suddenly I am a child again and nobody wants to go near me, nobody can cope with how badly I want to be held, or touched, or listened to, and there is nothing I can ever do about it.”
― Sophie Mackintosh, The Water Cure

“Refrain of the man, universal: *This is not my fault!*
See also: *I absolve myself of responsibility.*
And: *I never said that. You can't take the actions of my body as words.*”
― Sophie Mackintosh, The Water Cure

“The glossy leaves of abandoned foliage sheltered our bodies. We had not yet learned that they were shameful.”
― Sophie Mackintosh, The Water Cure

“Every time I think *I am very lonely*, it becomes bleaker and more true, You can think things into being. You can dwell them up from the ground.”
― Sophie Mackintosh, The Water Cure

“My body, up until now, has been just a thing that bled. A thing with vast reserves of pain. A strange instrument that I don't always understand. But something kicks in, triggered by the looking.”
― Sophie Mackintosh, The Water Cure

“There is fluidity to his movements, despite his size, that tells me he has never had to justify his existence, has never had to fold himself into a hidden thing, and I wonder what that must be like, to know that your body is irreporachable.”
― Sophie Mackintosh

“Stupid to meet a stranger but I was still convinced by the intrinstic goodness of people, I was so innocent, and I had not been exposed to the world very much. I didn't understand how rapidy things had changed, how all that had been needed was permission for everything to go to shit, and that persmission had been granted. I didnt know that there was no longer any need for the men to hold their bodies in check or to carry on the lie that we mattered.”
― Sophie Mackintosh, The Water Cure

“I know that without being touched I will die. I have known it for some time. It has always felt like I need more touch than the others anyway, my hands brushing over their shoulders or the tops of their heads as they shy away, because nobody is assigned to me. I am not anybody’s loved-most, have not been for some time. I have gone days, weeks, without touch and when that happens I can feel my skin thinning, I have to lay my body against grass and velvet and the corner of the sofa and rub my hands and elbows and thighs against anything until they are raw.”
― Sophie Mackintosh, The Water Cure

“If we were to spit at them, they would spit back harder. We expected that - we were prepared for it even. What we didn't expect was their growing outrage that we even dared to have moisture in our mouths. Then outrage that we had mouths at all. They would have liked us all dead, I know that now.”
― Sophie Mackintosh, The Water Cure

“Do not enter. Viewed from another angle, Do not leave.”
― Sophie Mackintosh, The Water Cure