Priestdaddy Quotes

“All my life I have overheard, all my life I have listened to what people will let slip when they think you are part of their we. A we is so powerful. It is the most corrupt and formidable institution on earth. Its hands are full of the crispest and most persuasive currency. Its mouth is full of received, repeating language. The we closes its ranks to protect the space inside it, where the air is different. It does not protect people. It protects its own shape.”
― Patricia Lockwood, Priestdaddy

“I'm not interested in heaven unless my anger gets to go there too. I'm not interested in a happy eternity unless I get to spend an eternity on anger first. Let me speak for the meek and say that we don't want the earth, if that's where all the bodies are buried. If we are resurrected at the end of the world, I want us to assemble with a military click, I want us to come together as an army against what happened to us here. I want us to bring down the enemy of our suffering once and for all, and I want us to loot the pockets, and I want us to take baths in the blood.”
― Patricia Lockwood, Priestdaddy

“My father despises cats. He believes them to be Democrats. He considers them to be little mean hillary clintons covered all over with feminist legfur. Cats would have abortions, if given half a chance. Cats would have abortions for fun. Consequently our own soft sinner, a soulful snowshoe named Alice, will stay shut in the bedroom upstairs, padding back and forth on cashmere paws, campaigning for equal pay, educating me about my reproductive system, and generally plotting the downfall of all men.”
― Patricia Lockwood, Priestdaddy

“Part of what you have to figure out in this life is, Who would I be if I hadn’t been frightened? What hurt me, and what would I be if it hadn’t?”
― Patricia Lockwood, Priestdaddy: A Memoir

“I know all women are supposed to be strong enough now to strangle presidents and patriarchies between their powerful thighs, but it doesn't work that way. Many of us were actually affected, by male systems and male anger, in ways we cannot always articulate or overcome. Sometimes, when the ceiling seems especially low and the past especially close, I think to myself, I did not make it out. I am still there in that place of diminishment, where that voice an octave deeper than mine is telling me what I am.”
― Patricia Lockwood, Priestdaddy

“The question for someone who was raised in a closed circle and then leaves it, is what is the us, and what is the them, and how do you ever move from one to the other?”
― Patricia Lockwood, Priestdaddy

“The desire to describe voice, gesture, skin color, is a desire to eat, take over, make into part of the pattern. I am happy every time to see a writer fail at this. I am happy every time to see real personhood resist our tricks. I am happy to see bodies insist that they are not shut up in this book, they are elsewhere. The tomb is empty, rejoice, he is not here. •”
― Patricia Lockwood, Priestdaddy: A Memoir

“It is probably the last conversation like this the seminarian and I will have. After his ordination, particular friendships with women will be discouraged. I understand why, but in a wider sense, it is frightening. If you are not friends with women, they are theoretical to you.”
― Patricia Lockwood, Priestdaddy

“This is the secret: when I encounter myself on the page, I am shocked at how forceful I seem. On the page I am strong, because that is where I put my strength. On the page I am everything that I am not, because that is where I put myself. I am no longer whispering through the small skirted shape of a keyhole: the door is knocked down and the roof is blown off and I am aimed once more at the entire wide night.”
― Patricia Lockwood, Priestdaddy

“Above all else, he loves trilogies. There has never been a trilogy he didn't like, and if you don't understand why, I have three words for you: father, son, and Holy Spirit. Foremost among his favorites is the original Star Wars trilogy, which he fervently believes is about priests in space, and the first three Alien films, which he believes are about how all women are destined to be mothers. Currently he is obsessed with the Transformers movies, because the greatest Transformer of all . . . is Jesus Christ. He even sat me down one day to have a serious discussion about "moral choices the Transformers are forced to make." At no point did I interrupt him to say, "But Dad, they're cars." This means I am becoming an adult. Because truly, the Transformers are more than cars. Some of them are trucks.”
― Patricia Lockwood, Priestdaddy

“The story of a family is always a story of complicity. It's about not being able to choose the secrets you've been let in on.”
― Patricia Lockwood, Priestdaddy

“What did those people teach you?" he asked me one night, mystified. "What exactly do Catholics believe?"

I'd been preparing my whole life for this question. "First of all, blood. BLOOD. Second of all, thorns. Third of all, put dirt on your forehead. Do it right now. Fourth of all, Martin Luther was a pig in a cloak. Fifth of all, Jesus is alive, but he's also dead, and he's also immortal, but he's also made of clouds, and his face is a picture of infinite peace, but he also always looks like one of those men in a headache commercial, because you'rec causing him so much suffering whenever you cuss. He is so gentle that sheep seem like demented murderers in his presence, but also rays of sunlight shoot out of his face so hard they can kill people. In fact, they do kill people, and one day they will kill you. He has a tattoo of a daisy on his lower back and he gets his hair permed every eight weeks. He's wearing a flowing white dress, but only because people didn't know about jeans back then. He's holding up two fingers because his dad won't let him have a gun. If he lived on earth, he would have a white truck, plastered with bumper stickers of Calvin peeing on a smaller Calvin who is not a Catholic."

Jason was aghast. "Thorns?" he whispered. "But that's the most dangerous part of the rose.”
― Patricia Lockwood, Priestdaddy

“I sometimes wish my childhood had been less obsessed with the question of why we are here. But that must be the question of any childhood. To write about your mother and father is to tell the story of your own close call, to count all the ways you never should have existed. To write about home is to write about how you dropped from space, dragging ellipses behind you like a comet, and how you entered your country and state and city, and finally your four-cornered house, and finally your mother's body and finally your own. From the galaxy to the grain and back again. From the fingerprint to the grand design. Despite all the conspiracies of the universe, we are here; every moment we are here we arrive.”
― Patricia Lockwood, Priestdaddy

“A trick I often use, when I feel overwhelming shame or regret, or brokenness beyond repair, is to think of a line I especially love, or a poem that arrived like lightning, and remember that it wouldn't have come to me if anything in my life had happened differently. Not that way. Not in those words.”
― Patricia Lockwood, Priestdaddy

“If you are not friends with women, they are theoretical to you.”
― Patricia Lockwood, Priestdaddy

“I’M NOT INTERESTED in heaven unless my anger gets to go there too. I’m not interested in a happy eternity unless I get to spend an eternity on anger first. Let me speak for the meek and say that we don’t want the earth, if that’s where all the bodies are buried. If we are resurrected at the end of the world, I want us to assemble with a military click, I want us to come together as an army against what happened to us here. I want us to bring down the enemy of our suffering once and for all, and I want us to loot the pockets, and I want us to take baths in the blood.”
― Patricia Lockwood, Priestdaddy: A Memoir

“A woman's body always stands on the outskirts of the town, verging on uncivilization. A think paper gown is all that separates it from the wilderness. Half of its whole being is devoted to remembering how to live in the woods. This is why Witch, this is why whore, this is why Unlucky, and this is why Unclean. This is why attempts to govern the female body always have the feeling of a last resort, because the female body is fundamentally ungovernable. Barbie, the neatest, tannest, blondest tall who ever existed. Barbie, from the Greek, meaning foreign or strange.”
― Patricia Lockwood, Priestdaddy

“I thought a voice had to be about your fluency, your dexterity, your virtuosity. But in fact your voice could be about your failings, your falterings, your physical limits. The voices that ring hardest in our heads are not the perfect voices. They are the voices with an additional dimension, which is pain.”
― Patricia Lockwood, Priestdaddy

“When you cannot pinpoint a pain in your body, the whole world seems to throb with it. Trees in pain, lit windows in pain, Wednesday nights in pain. Pianos flaming with pain, and the scale sliding up into a cry.”
― Patricia Lockwood, Priestdaddy

“Dads didn't care about lightning, because lightning was on the cover of all their favorite albums. Sometimes it was painted on their trucks as well. You could tell that if their kids were killed by lightning, they would be sad, but they would also feel superior about it for the rest of their lives, because it was without question the most hard-as way for a child to die. "My son Randy . . ." they would say, their voices trailing, "taken from us by pure electricity in the year Nineteen Hundred and Ninety . . .”
― Patricia Lockwood, Priestdaddy

“Whenever someone says the word "month" to me, I call up an empty square filled with other empty squares, days, and hours and minutes, bricks on bricks spiraling inward, pinwheel and diamond, and herringbone patterns marching smaller and smaller to some vanishing point.”
― Patricia Lockwood, Priestdaddy

“As they perform this ritual, I almost have to turn away, thinking again what a boomeranging, out-of-body experience it is to watch a religious childhood from the outside, when before I was in the very marrow of it.”
― Patricia Lockwood, Priestdaddy

“At nineteen, I ought to have been in college along with the rest of my high school class, gaining fifteen pounds of knowledge and bursting the sweatpants of my ignorance. What else did people do there? Changed their names to Patchouli, became vegetarians, grew out their leg hair for the first time, got so caught up in their studies of ancient Greece that they murdered a farmer while worshipping the grape-god in the countryside.”
― Patricia Lockwood, Priestdaddy: A Memoir

“When we came home later, my father was wearing his most transparent pair of boxer shorts, to show us he was angry, and drinking Baileys Irish Cream liqueur out of a miniature crystal glass, to show us his heart was broken.”
― Patricia Lockwood, Priestdaddy

“love is the only argument you can win by saying yes.”
― Patricia Lockwood, Priestdaddy: A Memoir

“It is sweet, sometimes, to hear cliches after long days of trying to say something new.”
― Patricia Lockwood, Priestdaddy

“My mother understood the fundamental facts about me. She knew that I would always prefer to eat with a tiny spoon rather than a regular one, that I was an excellent Thing Finder because I was always looking down at the sidewalk, that I wanted to recite spells, live in a nutshell, play a gold harp. That I had a house in my head that was far away. But it did not seem plausible, yet, that she and her pain had actually produced me.”
― Patricia Lockwood, Priestdaddy: A Memoir

“I did not make it out, but this does. Art goes outside, even if we don't; it fills the whole air, though we cannot raise our voices.”
― Patricia Lockwood, Priestdaddy

“You must always believe that life is as extraordinary as music says it is.” Rebecca West said that. You must also believe that it is as high, and as low, as strained to the breaking, and that the silence before and after it is as sweet.”
― Patricia Lockwood, Priestdaddy: A Memoir

“There is a love for structure in them that I recognize, and a desire to worship correctness that I know and I share. When I look at them, I think: to prize traditionalism above all else in a church that began in revolution is to do a great violence to it. But I feel that same ache for the past in myself: to uphold the columns of literature, grammar, the Western tradition. The English language began as an upheaval; I am not protecting it when I try to guard it against change. The Jesus Christ of it, Chaucer, walked across the water telling dirty jokes, made twenty stories stretch to feed a million people, spelled the word "cunt" five ways, performed miracles. Any innovation I put down on paper is an attempt to remind myself of this. I am not modern. I was not born to blaze new paths or bring down walls. I break form against my nature to tell myself that revolution, too, is a tradition that must be upheld.”
― Patricia Lockwood, Priestdaddy