The Nude Quotes

“this woman, who appeared more like the concept of a woman, and therefore, barely like a woman at all.”
― C. Michelle Lindley, The Nude

“At the thought, I felt not happiness, but the idea of happiness. I wondered if that was enough.”
― C. Michelle Lindley, The Nude

“We do not get redemption. Instead, we get small chances to forget our mistakes via a series of euphoric muscle contractions, and though sometimes they are worth the psychological torture, other times, they are not.”
― C. Michelle Lindley, The Nude

“The problem with memory is not its duplicity. The problem with memory, I thought then, is that it doesn’t have the guts to look you in the eye.”
― C. Michelle Lindley, The Nude

“I started to feel like I didn’t exist unless I was documenting myself.”
― C. Michelle Lindley, The Nude

“as much as I’d wanted to believe in ethics, ethics were not reality and, in reality, curation was a business. And in business, money won.”
― C. Michelle Lindley, The Nude

“She told me if you catch a man staring at you for too long that means he’s undressed you with his eyes. “And what are you to do then?” I’d asked. “Nothing,” she’d said. “I only wanted you to be aware. Knowledge is power.” Though it didn’t feel that way; it felt burdensome. It felt like I’d been standing on the mirrored side of a two-way glass. Not only did I have to care for how I looked; I had to care for the ways in which I was looked at. This was a violence I never came to terms with. I think I’ve held it over the head of every man I’d ever met. I’m not saying that’s fair.”
― C. Michelle Lindley, The Nude

“it was easy to see why the man had been so bold, so careless, in his approach—he understood which parts of me did not belong to me, long before I ever did.”
― C. Michelle Lindley, The Nude

“I thought about the blind figures of antiquity: Tiresias, the seer, for example—who went blind after he watched a nude Athena taking a bath—and Orion, who was blinded as a punishment for attempted rape. In every one of these stories, blindness had been the ultimate damnation for these men—a kind of castration.”
― C. Michelle Lindley, The Nude

“sensed a commonality to many women on this level, passing them by on the street, recognizing grotesque hunger in their waning gazes, the glory of self-punishment. Restraint as a net positive, a moral right.”
― C. Michelle Lindley, The Nude

“I experienced moments of regret, but they were veiled, mostly, by the kind of self-hatred that presents itself as absolution.”
― C. Michelle Lindley, The Nude

“she muttered something about a link between mental anguish and physical pleasure, as in, the more you had of one, the more you could achieve of the other.”
― C. Michelle Lindley, The Nude

“I assumed that many people had told Leon he was brilliant, and so, rather than becoming brilliant, he simply became a person who believed in his own brilliance, and perhaps, for men like him, that was just as good.”
― C. Michelle Lindley, The Nude

“But I wanted to be seen on my own terms, or else not at all. I often thought of Artemis, who’d have rather died than been viewed by mortals, and who, in fact, sicked a pack of wolves on one such voyeur after he caught her bathing naked—or by some accounts, as the ultimate act of revenge, turned the voyeur into a woman instead.”
― C. Michelle Lindley, The Nude

“For most of our relationship, the sex was good, in the sense that it was new, and therefore full of performance. We were still omitting who we really were, what kinds of things we liked. There was a time when I really believed we could build a life on mutual unknowability, when I really believed it would help us resist the trappings of intimacy,”
― C. Michelle Lindley, The Nude

“There was so much freedom, so much finesse, in the way she allowed people into her space, and then equally, and without much effort, escorted them out.”
― C. Michelle Lindley, The Nude

“To say she was beautiful would have been to miss the point. The point was that her beauty overwhelmed me and every time I stared too deeply at her, or thought too much about the ethics of having so much of one thing, my earlier excitement faded, and I began to feel less and less like a person, and more and more like some indistinct animal, hazy and immaterial, and let loose in the wild.”
― C. Michelle Lindley, The Nude

“These were how important meetings went: you exchanged enough words with one another until all parties involved seemed happy or else bored, until one brave person stood and unsubtly checked his watch.”
― C. Michelle Lindley, The Nude

“I thought: All the time. All the time I am posing.”
― C. Michelle Lindley, The Nude

“That’s the thing people always get wrong. Even God picks sides,”
― C. Michelle Lindley, The Nude

“I understood that—at least for a little while—my body was an asset and an affront, a creation made for everyone else’s eyes and opinions but my own.”
― C. Michelle Lindley, The Nude

“To mother seemed—at once—too public, too private an act.”
― C. Michelle Lindley, The Nude

“Plato said mimesis was a corruption of the soul.”
― C. Michelle Lindley, The Nude

“What I couldn’t say was that I did not feel cold, I felt attached to too much, all the time.”
― C. Michelle Lindley, The Nude