Woodworking Quotes

“But a person’s life is their own. Few sins are greater than trying to squeeze someone else into the shape you require them to be.”
― Emily St. James, Woodworking

“You make it sound so easy.” “It will seem easy once you’ve done it and impossible until you have. But you can do it. Your imagination simply isn’t big enough yet. You’ll see.”
― Emily St. James, Woodworking

“I got so used to feeling nothing, and now I feel *everything*, and I don't know how to talk about it”
― Emily St. James, Woodworking

“We are, none of us, a single set of destinies set by the accident of our birth. We can change and be changed. Our bodies know the language they must speak to make us the people we must become.”
― Emily St. James, Woodworking

“Erica pulled back her boxers’ waistband and looked down at her penis. It was small but obvious, and the second the doctor had pulled her out of her mother, he had taken one look at it and set the entire course of her life in motion, a life full of thwarted attempts to fit in and awkward male bonding that felt like trying to pass a test she hadn’t studied for. “It’s a boy” wasn’t a statement of fact. It was a prophecy, and people hate when prophecies don’t come true.”
― Emily St. James, Woodworking

“The stories I used to read where men transformed into women suggested a kind of instantaneous loss—a sudden vacuum where their manhood had once been, both literally and figuratively. But what has happened to me has actually been a slow blossoming, a colonization of myself with myself. The estrogen dissolving under my tongue will enter my bloodstream and slowly disseminate throughout my body, just as the other pills I am taking will shut down production of testosterone in other parts of my body. Sooner or later, my cells will realize that estrogen is now my dominant hormone and begin to soften my skin, to grow my breasts, to thicken my hair.
We are, none of us, a single set of destinies set by the accident of our birth. We can change and be changed. Our bodies know the language they must speak to make us the people we must become.”
― Emily St. James, Woodworking

“You are not a person. You are a signal that has gone missing with no antenna to interpret it.”
― Emily St. James, Woodworking

“It will seem easy once you’ve done it and impossible until you have. But you can do it. Your imagination simply isn’t big enough yet. You’ll see.”
― Emily St. James, Woodworking

“Do you know how many deathbeds I sat at all those years? And do you know what those dying people regretted most? All the lives they never led because they thought they might regret them.”
― Emily St. James, Woodworking

“Yeah, transition is a series of tiny things you do that add up to one big thing. But it’s also the way you get to the rest of your life, and then you’ve gotta fucking live it.”
― Emily St. James, Woodworking

“There are so many people in this room for whom the world doesn't work beautifully.”
― Emily St. James, Woodworking

“It’s my house too. I’m staying right here,” I say, because if you tell Jennifer you love her, she doesn’t believe it. The best way to let her know you love her is to sleep in her guest room every night until she figures out you’ll still be there when she wakes up and when she goes to sleep.”
― Emily St. James, Woodworking

“I go along to get along.”
― Emily St. James, Woodworking

“both seeing womanhood not as an escape but a reprieve. It had been so hard not to be women.”
― Emily St. James, Woodworking