Queen of the Fall Quotes

“Say a woman is more than the sum of her parts and I'll listen. Say she is more than fruit and blossom and branch and I'll nod my head yes. But say the body does not want and I will fall to the floor under the weight of a world that does not need the sweet talk of a heartbeat.”
― Sonja Livingston, Queen of the Fall: A Memoir of Girls and Goddesses

“Those are the facts but not the truth, which does not even speak the same language.”
― Sonja Livingston, Queen of the Fall: A Memoir of Girls and Goddesses

“All those prayers said back in high school, the teenager I was having sex without protection, my period late, tears taking the place of breath, moments of high drama, saying, Please God Please God let me not be pregnant let my period come so I can finish high school oh please just this once and I will start showing up on time and doing my homework if you just this once have mercy God O God take pity and let my period come. Sitting on the edge of my bed, crying into my hands, so certain of my ability to bear children that everything in me played with it like fire, then prayed for its prevention. It's possible that I repeated it once too often, my anti-pregnancy chant, and the words seeped into the fabric of my body, making it into a shield.”
― Sonja Livingston, Queen of the Fall: A Memoir of Girls and Goddesses

“How fickle it is, memory— preferring some days to others, granting first a blue sky, offering next the sound of laughter, swelling our remembrances until a largeness seeps into the grain of things and memory itself becomes billowed and flapping.”
― Sonja Livingston, Queen of the Fall: A Memoir of Girls and Goddesses