Nat > Nat's Quotes

“Because she looks like a cupcake. Dresses like a cupcake. Gives off a scent of baked lemony sugar. Pretty in a way that reminds you of frosting flourishes. Not the forest green and electric blue horrors in the supermarket, but the pastel kind that is used at weddings or tasteful Easter gatherings. She looks so much like a cupcake that when I first met her at orientation, I had a very real desire to eat her. Bite deeply into her white shoulder. Dig a fork in her cheek.”
― Mona Awad, Bunny

“They’re graduate students, I argue back. Exactly. Hiding from life in the most coddling, insular, and self-aggrandizing way.”
― Mona Awad, Bunny

“Why do you lie so much? And about the weirdest little things? my mother always asked me. I don’t know, I always said. But I did know. It was very simple. Because it was a better story.”
― Mona Awad, Bunny

“Reminding myself what an opportunity it is to be here, that this school opens doors, so many doors, surely it does, doesn’t it? That I came here because they give you the most funding, the most time to write, both of which I desperately needed. Neither of which I really had when I was working as a bookstore wench, a waitress, an office wench, a waitress again—the only jobs I could seem to get with my English degree.”
― Mona Awad, Bunny

“She hands me a dress patterned all over with little beheaded girls with blond beehive hairdos, their smiling heads floating next to their decapitated bodies. “Marie Antoinettes,” she says.”
― Mona Awad, Bunny

“We asked you to come out for bento boxes and you said, No, no, I’m too busy and important and better than you are for bento boxes.”
― Mona Awad, Bunny

“Samantha Heather Mackey thinks she understands everything, but she fails to understand the depths of the human heart. She fails to understand the depths of our heart. Our heart our heart our heart! We’ve read Jane Eyre too, you cunt, and we’ve read The Waves, and when we read it, you know, we wept for minutes.”
― Mona Awad, Bunny

“It makes us feel a little like God. No, we can’t go that far. In fact, we are a little fearful of God right now, if he’s out there. She, Bunny. If She’s out there. Or It. We like to think of It more as an energy. And don’t worry, It would approve. So approve. Of us. Because look at what we just did. Look at him.”
― Mona Awad, Bunny

“Oh my god, how much does Bunny love Pinkberry? She loves it so much she loves it so much she loves it so fucking much oh my god. We are so happy right now, we could hop, we could dance. Who will dance with us?!”
― Mona Awad, Bunny

“You do realize you’re in a cult, don’t you? You’re in a fucking cult.” This word hurts our ears so we cover them and think-sing a song from the latest Disney musical, which is our new favorite musical.”
― Mona Awad, Bunny

“It starts to rain. Hard. Because that’s the kind of weather that follows this kind of girl. She’s so slutty and dark she makes the clouds slutty and dark too. Pregnant with this dirty rain that starts to fall hard on both of us.”
― Mona Awad, Bunny

“Their cheeks are plump and pink and shining like they’ve been eating too much sugar, but actually it’s Gossip Glow, the flushed look that comes from throwing another woman under the bus.”
― Mona Awad, Bunny

“I listen to overwritten descriptions of staring deeply into a bonfire on a Costa Rican shore. Of getting pretend-lost in a labyrinthine garden with oh so many nooks and twists. Of being existential in LA, New York, but really, obviously, being rich. And content. And unalone.”
― Mona Awad, Bunny

“The way she says alone makes it sound like a cave. Like some hideous, dark cave whose oozing walls are teeming with all the unpleasant things of this world, and I am crawling willingly, brazenly, into this awful space of my own free will. Shoveling the vermin I find scuttling across the floor into my mouth for sustenance.”
― Mona Awad, Bunny

“The weirdest thing about a mind is that you can have the most intense things going on in there but no one else can see them. The world shrugs. Your pupils might dilate. You may sound incoherent. Your skin might shine with sweat. And there was no way anyone seeing me in that villa could have known what I was feeling, no way they could have appreciated the strange hell I was living through, or why death seemed such a phenomenally good idea.”
― Matt Haig, Reasons to Stay Alive

“It can affect people—millionaires, people with good hair, happily married people, people who have just landed a promotion, people who can tap dance and do card tricks and strum a guitar, people who have no noticeable pores, people who exude happiness in their status updates—who seem, from the outside, to have no reason to be miserable.”
― Matt Haig, Reasons to Stay Alive

“I think life always provides reasons to not die, if we listen hard enough. Those reasons can stem from the past—the people who raised us, maybe, or friends or lovers—or from the future—the possibilities we would be switching off.”
― Matt Haig, Reasons to Stay Alive

“How will we better contain depression? Expect no magic pill. One lesson learned from treating chronic pain is that it is tough to override responses that are hardwired into the body and mind. Instead, we must follow the economy of mood where it leads, attending to the sources that bring so many into low mood states—think routines that feature too much work and too little sleep. We need broader mood literacy and an awareness of tools that interrupt low mood states before they morph into longer and more severe ones. These tools include altering how we think, the events around us, our relationships, and conditions in our bodies (by exercise, medication, or diet).”
― Matt Haig, Reasons to Stay Alive

“As Emily Dickinson, eternally great poet and occasionally anxious agoraphobe, said: “That it will never come again is what makes life so sweet.”
― Matt Haig, Reasons to Stay Alive

“But so, increasingly, were books. I read and read and read with an intensity I’d never really known before. I mean, I’d always considered myself to be a person who liked books. But there is a difference between liking books and needing them. I needed books. They weren’t a luxury good during that time in my life. They were a Class A addictive substance. I’d have gladly got into serious debt to read (indeed, I did). I think I read more books in those six months than I had done during five years of university education, and I’d certainly fallen deeper into the worlds conjured on the page.”
― Matt Haig, Reasons to Stay Alive

“I used to sit with the bedside lamp on, reading for about two hours after Andrea had gone to sleep, until my eyes were dry and sore, always seeking and never quite finding, but with that feeling of being tantalizingly close.”
― Matt Haig, Reasons to Stay Alive

“Experience surrounds innocence and innocence can never be regained once lost.”
― Matt Haig, Reasons to Stay Alive

“And it doesn’t have to be writers. I was one of millions of people not just saddened by Robin Williams’s death, but scared of it, as if it somehow made it more likely for us to end up the same way.”
― Matt Haig, Reasons to Stay Alive

“To be calm becomes a kind of revolutionary act. To be happy with your own nonupgraded existence. To be comfortable with our messy, human selves, would not be good for business.”
― Matt Haig, Reasons to Stay Alive

“I’m wearying to escape into that glorious world, and to be always there: not seeing it dimly through tears, and yearning for it through the walls of an aching heart: but really with it, and in it.”
― Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights

“Every myth contains multiple timelines within itself: the time in which it is set, the time it is first told, and every retelling afterwards. Myths may be the home of the miraculous, but they are also mirrors of us. Which version of a story we choose to tell, which characters we place in the foreground, which ones we allow to fade into the shadows: these reflect both the teller and the reader, as much as they show the characters of the myth. We have made space in our storytelling to rediscover women who have been lost or forgotten. They are not villains, victims, wives and monsters: they are people.”
― Natalie Haynes, Pandora's Jar: Women in the Greek Myths

“But the verb in Pandora’s name is active, not passive: literally she is all-giving rather than all-gifted.”
― Natalie Haynes, Pandora's Jar: Women in the Greek Myths

“Her name on this pot is given as Anesidora, meaning ‘she who sends up gifts’, much as the earth sends up the shoots of plants which will feed us and our livestock. So Pandora’s intrinsic generosity is erased if we think of her only as gifted.”
― Natalie Haynes, Pandora's Jar: Women in the Greek Myths

“Hope is intrinsically positive in English, but in Greek (and the same with the Latin equivalent, spes) it is not. Since it really means the anticipation of something good or bad, a more accurate translation would probably be ‘expectation’. Before we can worry about whether it’s advantageous to us that it remains in the jar, we first have to decide if it is intrinsically good or bad. This is a genuinely complex linguistic and philosophical puzzle. No wonder it’s easier to just blame Pandora.”
― Natalie Haynes, Pandora's Jar: Women in the Greek Myths

“As mentioned above, they operate in at least two timelines: the one in which they are ostensibly set, and the one in which any particular version is written. The condescending, paternalistic tone in Hawthorne’s version of Pandora is far more overt than the irritable misogyny we find in Hesiod. Hesiod may present Pandora as a trick, a construct made by the gods to bring harm to men, but he wants us to know about the reasons Zeus orders her creation, the revenge on Prometheus and the rest. In simplifying the stories for children, Green and Hawthorne both oversimplify, so that Pandora becomes more villainous than even Hesiod intended.”
― Natalie Haynes, Pandora's Jar: Women in the Greek Myths