The Sleeping Sisters Quotes

“I’d feel myself slipping—one piece at a time falling off like a Mrs. Potato Head shaken by a child until my entire skull was gone again and I was the headless woman.”
 ”
― Jennifer Givhan, The Sleeping Sisters: A Novel

“My mother would say daughters of Coatlicue are born
with two hearts — one for love, one for rage.”
― Jennifer Givhan, The Sleeping Sisters: A Novel

“I found myself wondering if I could fall back in love with my husband. Oh, I loved him in the way of two people keeping each other’s darkest secrets.”
― Jennifer Givhan, The Sleeping Sisters

“Nothing has made me feel more seen and understood than the headless women… I found them from our grisliest true crime tales to our highest literature and art. The covers of books. Pop culture, even. Something there is that loves cutting a woman’s head off…
A focus on her body? The sense that she could be anywoman?
Everywoman?
That she could be me. You.”
― Jennifer Givhan, The Sleeping Sisters

“It’s not just owning a body I’ve been afraid of but raising children into full-fledged adults with bodies of their own. That want. And need.”
― Jennifer Givhan, The Sleeping Sisters

“I’ve spent motherhood dreading this. The seep of the plastic tarp. The squelch of our chanclas slap-slapping against the slush in the desert behind the Sleeping Sisters, their cinder cones numb and silent for millennia.”
― Jennifer Givhan, The Sleeping Sisters