Normal Women Quotes

“like all Normal Women, had been trained to understand male love as near constant sexual harassment, the battling of insistent, relentless paws,”
― Ainslie Hogarth, Normal Women

“Normal Women. Punished for their power. Enslaved by monsters. Sometimes. Other times they’d married one of the good ones, a term used by elder slaves to describe men who didn’t abuse their power, but simply perched comfortably, quietly, above the fray. Bringing home free Bellini powder. Letting their tired wives sleep in on the weekend. Not raping.”
― Ainslie Hogarth, Normal Women

“Dani recalled reading the findings of a major study—that married men live longer than unmarried men; married men are better protected from heart disease, dementia, depression, even experience more positive outcomes from cancer. And a widower was twice as likely to die within a year of his wife than a widow was. Married women, on the other hand, had a decreased life expectancy, decreased even further for those with children. Marriage and children, the two most powerful cultural currents for women, the two things they’re trained from birth to desire more than anything else, were, in fact, destroying them.”
― Ainslie Hogarth, Normal Women

“Think of how annoyed people get at a whiny little boy, but little girls, it’s sort of cute. The parents, they pass the policing down. The sons, they start to self-police. It’s vicious, Dani. Absolutely brutal.”
― Ainslie Hogarth, Normal Women

“It’s not sex that men are after, Dani. It’s the fucking break.” She lit the cigarette, took in the confusion on Dani’s face, and laughed a plume of smoke between them. “When the involuntary systems required to ejaculate are engaged—the endocrine system, for example, releasing the necessary chemicals to prepare for orgasm—it’s the only time that many men are able to experience vulnerability. Men have been trained, by fathers who want to make them strong, mothers who are scared to make them weak, to police themselves. Relentlessly. To bludgeon their feelings, their ability to really connect with other people. Their humanity.”
― Ainslie Hogarth, Normal Women

“Dani sipped her beer quietly and listened to the Normal Women rationalize their toxicity, their racism, as simply good common sense!”
― Ainslie Hogarth, Normal Women

“Clark did everything correctly, and all he asked for in return was everything.”
― Ainslie Hogarth, Normal Women

“A man of science, despite the fact that he hadn’t taken a science class since tenth grade, or ever read a book on the subject. He knew, though, that scientific truth was absolute. Dani would remind him that only religious people believed in absolutes, and Clark was, of course, just like many other men, a vocal atheist! Proof of his rationality, his intelligence. His character! No one had to tell Clark to be good. He”
― Ainslie Hogarth, Normal Women

“Expectations and limits communicated clearly, delivered to the customer’s satisfaction. Everything friendly. Everything reasonable. The fair contract of an industry that’s been fine-tuning itself since 2400 BCE.”
― Ainslie Hogarth, Normal Women

“Prostitution. The most basic supply and demand system baked into just about every human body on the planet: the intense male drive to, not procreate, but ejaculate—a distinction that must be noted, that men want to fuck whether fertilization is possible or not—and women, lucky women, have the greatest number of holes to supply this demand. Trade built right into her biology, pure profit for the penetrated, capitalism at work! Or at the very least the exchange of goods and services, a function of women’s very bodies!”
― Ainslie Hogarth, Normal Women

“Women like that were incapable of acknowledging unhappiness in their marriage, for the same reason a soldier might find it difficult to acknowledge shortcomings in the country he’d killed for.”
― Ainslie Hogarth, Normal Women

“Finally she could stop thinking about herself, about what she had or hadn’t accomplished with her life. It didn’t matter anymore if Dani was special. Because she didn’t matter anymore. Lotte had obliterated her, released her from that suffering.”
― Ainslie Hogarth, Normal Women

“Incredible how strong the bond was between two people who hate the same things, even stronger sometimes than between two people who love the same things.”
― Ainslie Hogarth, Normal Women

“Dani had always been shocked by how easy it was to lie to Clark. Like it was something he deserved. Like all men deserve to be lied to and all women deserve to lie.”
― Ainslie Hogarth, Normal Women

“It was irrelevant to him then that his wide had been annihilated by their daughter's bottomless need, overdosing on the putrid bliss of disappearing without dying.”
― Ainslie Hogarth, Normal Women

“I used to be scared or my power too, but I'm not anymore.”
― Ainslie Hogarth, Normal Women

“Married women, on the other hand, had a decreased life expectancy, decreased even further for those with children. Marriage and children, the two most powerful cultural currents for women, the two things they’re trained from birth to desire more than anything else, were, in fact, destroying them.”
― Ainslie Hogarth, Normal Women

“too proud to admit to wanting something, really wanting something, in any capacity to anyone ever.”
― Ainslie Hogarth, Normal Women

“like how faking a sick day from work used to take a small physical toll, involuntarily squaring up reality with the lie.”
― Ainslie Hogarth, Normal Women