Girl Dinner Quotes

“It’s every time you were called a bitch for saying no and a slut for saying yes.”
― Olivie Blake, Girl Dinner

“To good women—May we be them, may we raise them, and may they all enjoy their little treats.”
― Olivie Blake, Girl Dinner

“Because what did Sloane want? What any woman wanted! To scream, to tear open human flesh. To suffer a love that was carnivorous and devouring, resting on the thinnest edge of peril, a blade to kiss the throat. To be handled gently, sweetly. To cry, to drown, to eat. To be fucked, goddamnit, really fucked, lacerated by pleasure. To know what it was to feel worthy, to be cradled and cherished. To know you could crush a man’s head between your thighs.”
― Olivie Blake, Girl Dinner

“You’re a woman, and it’s your job to fade into the background. It’s your job to make sure your children love their father and never know what a fucking idiot he is, or how little he is capable of accomplishing without you. You’re a woman, and it’s your job to have it all but never complain about how heavy it is to carry. You’re a woman, so you must strive to achieve, even if those achievements will drive the envy that means you will always be disparaged and never be embraced. You’re a woman, and you were put here to suffer and feel pain, or so people will say, and so they will act, and so you will never be properly treated and your borne-in aches will never be taken for the fatal blows that they are. You are a woman, and so the transgressions against you will always be justified in some way by what you wore or what you said or who you are, and everything bad that happens to you will always somehow be deserved. Unless you die a martyr, for your children, which is the only sure way to be a Good Woman. Because then, when you are dust and unexamined, important only for the act of ending, you will finally have the honor of being a saint.”
― Olivie Blake, Girl Dinner

“Is it just me or has no one else noticed that the feminist lifestyle is destroying their happiness? I don’t want to girl boss for 40+ hours a week. I want to be outside.”
― Olivie Blake, Girl Dinner

“Is that possible? Removing my womanhood from the equation?”
― Olivie Blake, Girl Dinner

“I can't be expected to girlboss under these fucking conditions! And what the fuck is a She-E-O?”
― Olivie Blake, Girl Dinner

“After a certain point you have to allow yourself to stop jumping through hoops. If he won’t recognize you as a person worthy of respect, nothing you do can change that. And that’s not your fault, it’s his.”
― Olivie Blake, Girl Dinner

“There’s no way to win,” Sloane sobbed, and sobbed and sobbed. In her mind, on her cheeks, the dam had broken. “It doesn’t matter how hard you try, how much you love, how smart you are. How am I supposed to do it? How am I supposed to tell her to love or to dream when I know goddamn well that it always ends like this?”
― Olivie Blake, Girl Dinner

“Sloane felt powerful in that deeply frustrating way, because there was no real power here. She was at least old enough now to understand that, which was what made her, in her mind, less attractive than Arya’s other theoretical options. The imaginary younger woman who still felt like making a man come was the same thing as having power over him. But could it get you tenure?”
― Olivie Blake, Girl Dinner

“If modeling “appropriate” conventions was the necessary bar for all women to clear, what behavior did Alex expect from the queer woman, the BIPOC woman, the disabled woman, the trans woman…? Which was not even to speak of the unattractive woman, god forbid!”
― Olivie Blake, Girl Dinner

“How could she be a mother when she was still just an idiot baby? How could she get up every morning and not sob to death over being so fucking dumb?”
― Olivie Blake, Girl Dinner

“I’m sure there’s something there,” Burns said”
― Olivie Blake, Girl Dinner

“But all those things were nothing. The physical shape-shifting only camouflaged a lovely that was more like insanity, contortions of the body to cage the madness inside. A love that defied reason and felt closer to pain[...] This, it was a rush of maternal carnage, love like nothing she'd been capable of before because it fell so close to violence. It was a love that didn't whisper about the atrocities it would gladly commit.”
― Olivie Blake, Girl Dinner

“as the less valuable person in the partnership, could not equitably rely on the importance of her own work.”
― Olivie Blake, Girl Dinner

“And say that Sloane did leave Isla at home with him, knowing he wouldn’t engage her as Miss Lily did, as Sloane did, as Alex did. How was she to know he’d even be there—that she could trust him even a little, or at all?”
― Olivie Blake, Girl Dinner

“Wasn’t there something wrong there somewhere, something off, with a woman who had chosen a man who was probably a predator, or was it just that she had chosen a man?”
― Olivie Blake, Girl Dinner

“Have you considered just … going out and having a little treat?” said Nina. “I don’t think your existential suffering is doing anything specific for the Sudan.”
― Olivie Blake, Girl Dinner

“A good woman was just a good loser, because there was no fucking way to win. You fall in love, you marry someone devoted and interesting, and bam, you still somehow turn into your mother, and his mother, and every mother since the dawn of time. Was heterosexual marriage the problem? But then there was still the matter of being denied tenure, of being told the details of your life are uninteresting to serious men. Were men the problem?”
― Olivie Blake, Girl Dinner

“And what kind of person would you be if you didn’t choose your daughter over everything?” “A man,” said Sloane.”
― Olivie Blake, Girl Dinner

“She wanted Burns’s approval, followed by Burns’s apology, to prove her instincts sound. And of course she felt that way!”
― Olivie Blake, Girl Dinner

“In fairness to them,” commented Sloane with that same diabolical rationalization, “there is a very palpable tipping point where becoming undesirable as a sexual object diminishes the mythology of your acceptance by men. But since that acceptance was a myth to begin with, the loss is imaginary, and yet absolutely crushing at the same time.”
― Olivie Blake, Girl Dinner