More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
It is only that every day one grows a little, every day something is different, so that in the heaping up of days suddenly a thing that was impossible has become possible. This is how a girl becomes a grown woman.
It is that time in life when children start to wear their adult faces.
the body has contradictory impulses: fear is as significant as lust, physical pain as strong as desire.
It feels as natural as anything she’s ever done, as known and understood as the first time she had sex, as her body saying, Hey, I got this.
The thought makes her laugh again. She finds she’s doing that more often now, just laughing. There’s a sort of constant ease, as if it’s high summer all the time inside her.
The power to hurt is a kind of wealth.
“You have to just hold her,” Gordy says. “Just put your arms around her shoulders and hold her until she wakes. She’ll wake by herself, you just have to wait.” She often sleeps for an hour or more.
Officially, in the West, the thing is still a “crisis,” with all the word implies: exceptional, deplorable, temporary.
The only wave that changes anything is a tsunami. You have to tear down the houses and destroy the land if you want to be sure no one will forget you.”
“The day someone else knows where your money’s going better than you do, that’s the day you’ve lost.”
Pain and fear. These things whittle away control.
knows what direction it was heading in.
There is a part in each of us which holds fast to the old truth: either you are the hunter or you are the prey. Learn which you are. Act accordingly. Your life depends upon it.
“Why did they do it, Nina and Darrell?” And the other answers, “Because they could.” That is the only answer there ever is.
The power seeks its outlet.
Children are born so small. It does not matter if they are boys or girls. They are all born so weak and so powerless.
There’s never been a right choice, honeybun. The whole idea that there are two things and you have to choose is the problem.
She acts on people, and people act on her. When does power exist? Only in the moment it is exercised.
Every name we give ourselves is wrong. Our dreams are more true than our waking.
I feel instinctively—and I hope you do, too—that a world run by men would be more kind, more gentle, more loving and naturally nurturing.
Have you thought about the evolutionary psychology of it? Men have evolved to be strong worker homestead-keepers, while women—with babies to protect from harm—have had to become aggressive and violent. The few partial patriarchies that have ever existed in human society have been very peaceful places.
People don’t believe it because it doesn’t fit with what they already think.
Gender is a shell game. What is a man? Whatever a woman isn’t. What is a woman? Whatever a man is not. Tap on it and it’s hollow.
