Upright Women Wanted Quotes

“When there's people around that we don't trust, we let them think we're the kinds of people who are allowed to exist. And the only kind of Librarian that's allowed to exist is one who answers to she.”
― Sarah Gailey, Upright Women Wanted

“She wanted that satisfaction. She wanted it for herself wanted it like a half-starved alley-rat watching that table through a window on a bellyaching night. She didn't know how to get it—but she had a feeling that if she stuck with the Librarians for long enough, she might be able to figure it out. How to feast instead of starving.

How to like the person who she was instead of fighting it.”
― Sarah Gailey, Upright Women Wanted

“Keep fighting. It will be hard, and it will be awful, and it will be worth it. Don’t give up, even when it feels like dying. Don’t give up.
This is only the beginning.”
― Sarah Gailey, Upright Women Wanted

“She didn't relish being called "sweetheart," but something deep in her chimed at the word: this was a man who would let her go, if she was nice and pliant and didn't cause trouble. This was a man who wanted her to be the kind of woman who liked to hear "sweetheart," and that was a role she knew how to play.”
― Sarah Gailey, Upright Women Wanted

“Not the question Cye had asked—do you believe everything you read?—but the question they hadn’t asked: why do you believe everything you read?”
― Sarah Gailey, Upright Women Wanted

“Penny for your thoughts?’
Esther would have charged a great deal more than a penny for the kinds of thoughts that entered her mind at the way Cye looked up at the stars.”
― Sarah Gailey, Upright Women Wanted

“It was a truth that didn't feel anything like safety.

It felt better than safety.

It felt like gunpowder at her back, driving her toward a fight that needed winning.

Keep fighting. It will be hard, and it will be awful, and it will be worth it. Don't give up, even when it feels like dying. Don't give up.

This is only the beginning.”
― Sarah Gailey, Upright Women Wanted

“She had seen a man decide that she deserved to die and she had killed him for it.”
― Sarah Gailey, Upright Women Wanted

“You really believe all that? About how there’s only one end in sight for people like you?” Amity said, tipping her chin back toward the sky and pulling her hat partway down her face, so only her nose and mouth were visible. “Horseshit. You only think that because you’ve never seen different.” Esther started to reply, but Amity held up a still-bloody finger. “Don’t interrupt me, pup. You know I’m right. You’re a woman and you love people who aren’t men, is that right?”
Esther hesitated to make sure she wasn’t interrupting. “That’s right,” she said, “but—”
“No but, it’s just true,” Amity said, proving that her rule about interruptions only ran in one direction. “And you’ve only ever read stories about people like you, right? You’ve never met one of your kind before now. Well, except for Beatriz,” she added. “Ain’t that so?”
“Yeah,” Esther answered reluctantly. She sensed a trap coming, but she couldn’t figure out how to step around it.
“All those stories you’ve read,” Amity said softly, pulling her hat back off her eyes by a few degrees. “Who gave ’em to you?”
― Sarah Gailey, Upright Women Wanted

“I’m they on the road and she in town. You can take time getting used to they on the road, but if you forget about she when we’re in town, you’ll have to learn how to think around a bullet.”
― Sarah Gailey, Upright Women Wanted

“She couldn’t rightly say that this wasn’t going according to plan, since there hadn’t been much of a plan in the first place, but it certainly wasn’t going the way she’d hoped it might.”
― Sarah Gailey, Upright Women Wanted

“The Librarians would make sure of it.”
― Sarah Gailey, Upright Women Wanted

“Between Esther and the horizon, the wagons shimmered in the heat. She knew that they weren't an oasis— no cool shade or sweet water was waiting for her there. But they weren't a mirage, either, and that hope felt like just enough to fit in her fists.”
― Sarah Gailey, Upright Women Wanted

“Just because he needed killing doesn't mean I can sleep easy.”
― Sarah Gailey, Upright Women Wanted

“...a sharp edge on the words. It was a tone Esther recognized. The kind of dangerous that would have been hard to notice if she hadn't heard it a hundred times before. It was the danger of assumed authority. Amity thought of herself as more important than the librarians. Thought her work was more urgent. Esther had grown up in a house with that same kind of importance. She knew what happened when it was challenged. She knew what people who thought of themselves that way would do, just to protect the idea that they had the right to do it.”
― Sarah Gailey, Upright Women Wanted

“You’ve got to stop waiting to be told you’re allowed to do things,” Amity said. She didn’t look at her, kept loping along as casual as a fed coyote. “You’ve got to promise me you’ll stop being too scared to piss without permission.”
― Sarah Gailey, Upright Women Wanted

“She would have to dig out the broken part of herself, the part that had made her kiss Beatriz that first time and then every time that came after.”
― Sarah Gailey, Upright Women Wanted

“And then they were kissing her. Sudden and certain, just like everything else they did.”
― Sarah Gailey, Upright Women Wanted

“Something deep in her longed for a day when she would have a little signal, shared with someone who cared enough about her to stop everything in its tracks to make sure she knew she could trust them.”
― Sarah Gailey, Upright Women Wanted

“Relentlessly unpossessive, that was Beatriz. Wild with it. The only thing she’d ever seemed attached to was the idea that none of it mattered.”
― Sarah Gailey, Upright Women Wanted

“These were people who were happy with themselves. They liked themselves, not in spite of who they were but because of who they were.”
― Sarah gailey, Upright Women Wanted

“Those eyes were canaries, Esther realised—they sang everything that passed through Leda’s head, loud and clear enough for anyone to catch.”
― Sarah Gailey, Upright Women Wanted

“She let her hand linger on his shoulder for a moment as she dismounted, and she hated herself for it, for all of it. For charming him. She hated herself, because she didn't rightly know why she was bothering to do it— she didn't need anything from him other than safe and free passage in and out of Endurance. But she did it anyway, more of a compulsion than a reflex. Her speech drifted to the familiar, the ungrammatical, the helpless. She caught herself tucking her chin down, trying to make herself look just a little shy.”
― Sarah Gailey, Upright Women Wanted

“People like us, we drew the bad in. There's no good end, not for us. We knew better, we read all the stories-read them too much, probably. We knew that the bad would find us if we didn't...”
― Sarah Gailey, Upright Women Wanted

“The highways had fallen into serious disrepair some time before, just like any other street. Esther knew that they’d been smooth as glass once, before the money to keep them that way got soaked up by the money-sponge that was War.”
― Sarah Gailey, Upright Women Wanted

“back at camp when she was trying to get everything right. Cye had said “fleabitten,” and it had taken Esther a long time to figure out that the answer wasn’t a joke. She hadn’t figured out that “fleabitten” was a real way to describe a horse until the third time”
― Sarah Gailey, Upright Women Wanted

“You must be as simple as you are pretty.”
― Sarah Gailey, Upright Women Wanted

“A revolver was too close-up for a woman to carry, her father’d always said. A revolver was a man’s weapon, made to end an argument.”
― Sarah Gailey, Upright Women Wanted

“But as soon as Cye walked away, everything fell out of Esther's mind save for the repetitive movement of the braiding and the question Cye had left her with. Not the question Cye had asked— do you believe everything you read?—but the question they hadn't asked: why do you believe everything you read?”
― Sarah Gailey, Upright Women Wanted

“You can fuck right off into the Canyon," Esther said, trying to keep the grin out of her voice.

Amity tipped her hat. "I've just been waiting for an invitation," she said. "I'll go let the boss know about it. Wouldn't want to fuck off into the Canyon without giving notice.”
― Sarah Gailey, Upright Women Wanted