Day > Day's Quotes

“I don’t entirely understand how anyone gets a boyfriend. Or a girlfriend. It just seems like the most impossible odds. You have to have a crush on the exact right person at the exact right moment. And they have to like you back. A perfect alignment of feelings and circumstances. It’s almost unfathomable that it happens as often as it does.”
― Becky Albertalli, The Upside of Unrequited

“Because I have to admit: there's something really badass about truly, honestly not caring what people think about you.”
― Becky Albertalli, The Upside of Unrequited

“There’s just something terrifying about admitting you like someone. In a way, it’s actually easier when there’s no chance of anything happening. But there’s this threshold where things suddenly become possible. And then your cards are on the table. And there you are, wanting, right out in the open.”
― Becky Albertalli, The Upside of Unrequited

“I mean, here’s the thing I don’t get. How do people come to expect that their crushes will be reciprocated? Like, how does that get to be your default assumption?”
― Becky Albertalli, The Upside of Unrequited

“Even if he likes me, I’m not sure he’d like me naked. I hate that I’m even thinking that. I hate hating my body. Actually, I don’t even hate my body. I just worry everyone else might. Because chubby girls don’t get boyfriends, and they definitely don’t have sex. Not in movies—not really—unless it’s supposed to be a joke. And I don’t want to be a joke.”
― Becky Albertalli, The Upside of Unrequited

“You would matter. That's the thing. I get into this weird place sometimes where I worry about that. I've never told anyone this - not my moms, not Cassie - but that's the thing I'm most afraid of. Not mattering. Existing in a world that doesn't care who I am.”
― Becky Albertalli, The Upside of Unrequited

“I’m not trying to overthink things. I’m trying to be less careful. But you have to be your heart’s own goalie.”
― Becky Albertalli, The Upside of Unrequited

“Perfect! You guys are the same age. I bet you have a lot in common.”
Classic adult logic. Reid and I are vaguely the same age, so of course we’re basically soul mates. It’s like horoscopes. Somehow I’m supposed to believe that I’m similar in some meaningful way to every single person born on my birthday. Or every single Sagittarius. I mean, I barely have anything in common with Cassie, and we were born six minutes apart.”
― Becky Albertalli, The Upside of Unrequited

“And suddenly, I feel like crying, but not in a bad way. More like in the way you feel when someone gives you a perfect present—something you’d been wanting, but thought you couldn’t ask for. It’s that feeling of someone knowing you in all the ways you needed to be known.”
― Becky Albertalli, The Upside of Unrequited

“I never really know the protocol for this kind of situation. It's like when you're in line at a store, and a grandma starts telling you all about her grandchildren or her arthritis, and you smile and nod along. But then it's your turn to check out, so you're just like okay, well, good-bye forever.”
― Becky Albertalli, The Upside of Unrequited

“It’s just a lot of me. Way too much of me.”
― Becky Albertalli, The Upside of Unrequited

“I guess it’s just this feeling that my body is secretly all wrong. Which means any guy who assumes I’m normal is going to flip his shit if we get to the point of nakedness. Whoa. Nope. Not what I signed up for.”
― Becky Albertalli, The Upside of Unrequited

“Okay, I just gotta say it." The guy touches my arm. "You are fucking gorgeous for a big girl."
I freeze.
"It's a compliment!"
I look at him. "Fuck you.”
― Becky Albertalli, The Upside of Unrequited

“But it's not quite so raw. You know, when you're seventeen, everything feels like the end of the world. Or the beginning of the world. And that's an awesome thing.”
― Becky Albertalli, The Upside of Unrequited

“Here's the thing: I'm used to being told I have a pretty face. Or pretty hair, or pretty eyes. But it's different, being called beautiful. Just beautiful, without conditions.”
― Becky Albertalli, The Upside of Unrequited

“But when you're that pretty, you can date anyone, and people know you picked the geek on purpose. Like, you could have had the hot guy, but you didn't want him. But when you're a fat geek who likes another fat geek, everyone assumes you're settling.”
― Becky Albertalli, The Upside of Unrequited

“I hate hating my body. Actually, I don’t even hate my body. I just worry everyone else might.”
― Becky Albertalli, The Upside of Unrequited

“but if I had to describe the feeling of a crush, I’d say this: you just finished running a mile, and you have to throw up, and you’re starving, but no food seems appealing, and your brain becomes fog, and you also have to pee. It’s this close to intolerable. But I like it...
Because there’s nausea and fog, but there’s also this: an unshakable feeling that something wonderful is about to happen.”
― Becky Albertalli, The Upside of Unrequited

“there’s something really badass about truly, honestly not caring what people think about you. A lot of people say they don’t care. Or they act like they don’t care. But I think most people care a lot. I know I do.”
― Becky Albertalli, The Upside of Unrequited

“Still, somehow, inexplicably, “man-hater” is a word tossed around with insouciance as if this was a real thing that did harm. Meanwhile we have no real word for men who kill women. Is the word just “men”?”
― Jessica Valenti, Sex Object: A Memoir

“A high school teacher once told me that identity is half what we tell ourselves and half what we tell other people about ourselves. But the missing piece he didn’t mention—the piece that holds so much weight, especially in the minds of young women and girls—is the stories that other people tell us about ourselves. Those narratives become the ones we shape ourselves into. They’re who we are, even if so much of it is a performance. This”
― Jessica Valenti, Sex Object

“Women are raising children, picking up socks, and making sure you feel like a man by supporting you when you need it and looking sexy (but not trying too hard, because that would be pathetic). We're being independent and bad bitches while wearing fucking lipstick and heels so as not to offend your delicate aesthetic sensibility, yet even just the word "feminist" pisses you off. How dare we.”
― Jessica Valenti, Sex Object: A Memoir

“Because even subversive sarcasm adds a cool-girl nonchalance, an updated, sharper version of the expectation that women be forever pleasant, even as we're eating shit.”
― Jessica Valenti, Sex Object: A Memoir

“Being treated nicely felt wrong somehow, as if we were acting out what a relationship should be rather than being in it. For men who hate women, an admission like this one is proof that see, women want a guy who treats them like shit but that's not true either. What is closer to the truth is that when confronted with the love you deserve, it is easier to mock it than accept it.”
― Jessica Valenti, Sex Object: A Memoir

“Ignoring men, whether romantically or rhetorically, is existential violence to them.”
― Jessica Valenti, Sex Object: A Memoir

“Women are raising children, picking up socks, and making sure you feel like a man by supporting you when you need it and looking sexy (but not trying too hard, because that would be pathetic). We are being independent and bad bitches while wearing fucking lipstick and heels so as not to offend your delicate aesthetic sensibility, yet even just the word 'feminist' pisses you off. How dare we. Still, no name for the men who kill women because we have the audacity not to do what we are supposed to do: fuck you, accept you, want you, let you hurt us, be blank slates for your desires. You are entitled to us but we are not even allowed to call you what you are.”
― Jessica Valenti, Sex Object: A Memoir

“But no one wants to listen to our sad stories unless they are smoothed over with a joke or nice melody. And even then, not always. No one wants to hear a woman talking or writing about pain in a way that suggests that it doesn't end. Without a pat solution, silver lining, or happy ending we're just complainers -- downers who don't realize how good we actually have it.

Men's pain and existential angst are the stuff of myth and legends and narratives that shape everything we do, but women's pain is a backdrop- a plot development to push the story along for the real protagonists. Disrupting that story means we're needy or shellfish, or worst of all, man-haters - as if after all men have done to women over the ages the mere act of not liking them for it is most offensive.”
― Jessica Valenti, Sex Object: A Memoir

“I am tired of faking confidence or being told that my lack thereof is a fault when it seems to me the most natural reaction I could possibly have to the lifelong feedback women are given. I don't want to be confident or inspirational and I don't really want to buck up anymore because the faking takes more energy sometimes than the work itself.”
― Jessica Valenti, Sex Object: A Memoir

“No matter the content, the message is clear: we are here for their enjoyment and little else. We have to walk through the rest of our day knowing that our discomfort gave someone a hard-on.”
― Jessica Valenti, Sex Object: A Memoir

“I have known enough of women to understand they are as duplicitous and vicious as men. If they are capable of being our equals in malice, why not in our better qualities as well? There are no masculine virtues, Veronica. And none sacred to women either. We are all of us just people, and most badly flawed ones at that.”
― Deanna Raybourn, A Curious Beginning