The Lightness Quotes

“Girls love to be unlike other girls, because of the lies we are told about what other girls are like.”
― Emily Temple, The Lightness

“Here is what I have come to believe: in the end, religion has done more harm than good. For one thing, there’s war, ethnic cleansing, genital mutilation, abused altar boys, the systematic oppression of women—the foundational text of Christianity locates women as the source of all evil, do not forget this when interacting with the faithful—as well as anyone who doesn’t fit into its narrow moral straitjacket. Hierarchy breeds corruption. Patriarchy cultivates debasement. Believing in something—anything—so blindly is corrosive. You follow a recipe instead of inventing your own world. There are certain corners you can’t see into. My mother used to say that raising your son or daughter to believe in God is child abuse. I have repeated this often, to shocked looks, even from my secular friends. I’m sorry: I believe it. Religious belief may be a pleasant distortion, a comfort, for a while, but too much, unexamined, for too long and it eats away at your body, turns you stupid, kills you. Serena was right: the effect is not dissimilar to alcohol.”
― Emily Temple, The Lightness

“It's strange, the importance we assign to handling things our loved ones have touched, or to revisiting historic scenes, of epic battles or first dates. To sleeping in Lizzie Borden's bedroom. These are attempts at folding time, at pinning one piece of fabric to another. But time doesn't work that way, you know. That's why you feel so empty afterward.”
― Emily Temple, The Lightness

“At the moment of the truly unbearable, I once heard someone say, you can’t help but change form.”
― Emily Temple, The Lightness

“Closeness cannot be manufactured. It knits itself from unseen fibers, and we can crochet the ends with approximations of our favorite flowers, but we can't choose the colour, or the kind of wool. It knits itself, or it doesn't.”
― Emily Temple, The Lightness

“Now I know that the American Dream can leave you in a coma or even kill you. But of course, we knew that back then too. It wouldn’t have been any fun otherwise.”
― Emily Temple, The Lightness

“Studies have shown that the act of looking at something attractive - a person, a product, some honest-to-goodness nature - triggers an involuntary series of synapse firings in the motor cerebellum. As it turns out, this is the exact same neural sequence that causes us to reach out a hand. Beauty, then, literally moves us. We all know this: beauty can easily force a hand. But will we ever shake the pressing delusion, as Tolstoy put it, that beauty is the same as goodness? After all, how often does goodness truly force a hand? more likely it stays it, and even then, barely, and even then, only for a time.”
― Emily Temple, The Lightness

“Oh, but how could I believe in anything but this? It was right in front of me, and I could touch it.”
― Emily Temple, The Lightness

“Anyway, we may all just bee atoms in the void, but according to quantum mechanics, no object objectively exist at all, in the void or otherwise. Particles have no inherent values, only probabilities, and they only materialize when they are measured--which means that on a quantum level, reality simply isn't there unless we're looking directly at it. If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it, there is no tree, and no forest. Is it any different if that tree was once a girl? I think it is not.”
― Emily Temple, The Lightness

“But most of all, I remember space. I remember doing nothing. but doing it together, which made it something after all. Now when I put a dish in the microwave for thirty seconds I am paralyzed by the discomfort of unorganized time. Is thirty seconds enough to read something? Check the weather? Pee? I reach for anything to occupy me, but now I've spent all of my time wondering how I should spend it, and the machine beeps, and I have purpose again.”
― Emily Temple, The Lightness

“Girls, on the other hand, are master idolaters. They are like Catholics in that way, or Satanists--all gilded shrine and ceremony, all theme and ritual and symbol. They hunger for the gaudy trappings of faith.”
― Emily Temple, The Lightness

“was reminded, again, of the shapes of women, the impossible geometry into which I was meant to fold myself.”
― Emily Temple, The Lightness

“I was half convinced I had imagined them, simply desired them into being. It was the obvious explanation. Girls like them, a girl like me. We are what we think. Whom did I imagine I was fooling?”
― Emily Temple, The Lightness

“I was reminded, again, of the shapes of women, the impossible geometry into which I was meant to fold myself.”
― Emily Temple, The Lightness

“I still couldn't identify that familiar smell. Soil and chocolate. Cinnamon and fern. Pomegranate baseball honeycomb leaf. Who knows what anything smells like? Things only smell like feelings.”
― Emily Temple, The Lightness

“(Girls love to be unlike other girls, because of the lies we are told about what other girls are like.)”
― Emily Temple, The Lightness