Three Women Quotes

“We pretend to want things we don't want so nobody can see us not getting what we need.”
― Lisa Taddeo, Three Women

“Women shouldn't judge each others lives, if we haven't been through one another's fires.”
― Lisa Taddeo, Three Women

“One inheritance of living under the male gaze for centuries is that heterosexual women often look at other women the way a man would.”
― Lisa Taddeo, Three Women

“Throughout history, men have broken women’s hearts in a particular way. They love them or half-love them and then grow weary and spend weeks and months extricating themselves soundlessly, pulling their tails back into their doorways, drying themselves off, and never calling again. Meanwhile, women wait. The more in love they are and the fewer options they have, the longer they wait, hoping that he will return with a smashed phone, with a smashed face, and say, I’m sorry, I was buried alive and the only thing I thought of was you, and feared that you would think I’d forsaken you when the truth is only that I lost your number, it was stolen from me by the men who buried me alive, and I’ve spent three years looking in phone books and now I have found you. I didn’t disappear, everything I felt didn’t just leave. You were right to know that would be cruel, unconscionable, impossible. Marry me.”
― Lisa Taddeo, Three Women

“We don't remember what we want to remember. We remember what we can't forget.”
― Lisa Taddeo, Three Women

“Sometimes there’s nothing better on earth than someone asking you a question.”
― Lisa Taddeo, Three Women

“The problem, she’s starting to understand, is that a man will never let you fall completely into hell. He will scoop you up right before you drop the final inch so that you cannot blame him for sending you there. He keeps you in a dinerlike purgatory instead, waiting and hoping and taking orders.”
― Lisa Taddeo, Three Women

“if people are denied certain parts of relationships they need as children, they hunt for these parts as adults.”
― Lisa Taddeo, Three Women

“It's the nuances of desire that hold the truth of who we are at our rawest moments. I set out to register the heat and sting of female want so that men and other women might more easily comprehend before they condemn. Because it's the quotidian moments of our lives that will go on forever, that will tell us who we were, who our neighbors and our mothers were, when we were too diligent in thinking they were nothing like us. This is the story of three women.”
― Lisa Taddeo, Three Women

“The rumours, as usual, didn't take into account the complexity, much less the truth.”
― Lisa Taddeo, Three Women

“Look at me. I put this war paint on, but underneath I’m scarred and scared and horny and tired and love you.”
― Lisa Taddeo, Three Women

“There should be a stronger word than regret.”
― Lisa Taddeo, Three Women

“Disappointment would mean that you were occasionally used to things going your way.”
― Lisa Taddeo, Three Women

“Her whole life stretches out before her, a path of imprecise but multiple directions. She could be an astronaut, a rap star, an accountant. She could be happy.”
― Lisa Taddeo, Three Women

“Sleep is not sweet but dumb. It is a gap in time, a gap in pain.”
― Lisa Taddeo, Three Women

“So what’s the fantasy? It’s nothing, really, if you have to ask. Sure, yes, the fantasy is he did the stuff she didn’t even know she needed, like cleaning his amber drops off the rim of the toilet, getting the kids’ clothes ready for the following morning, putting the scissors back where the scissors go, he did a bunch of things before the thought of them even entered Sloane’s head. Invisible service, the kind she likes the waiters to practice in her restaurant. He cleared the room in her brain so that she might be able to get sexually excited in that now wide-open field up there where the to-dos aren’t scrolling and the boxes next to each task are checked—but that overwhelming list didn’t even get written up because he did it before she thought about it. He even walked the dog. Ha, she thinks. Come on. That’s crazy. After all, we don’t even have a fucking dog.”
― Lisa Taddeo, Three Women

“The way the wind blows in our country can make us question who we are in our own lives. Often the type of waiting women do is to make sure other women approve, so that they may also approve of themselves.”
― Lisa Taddeo, Three Women

“My mother never spoke about what she wanted. About what turned her on or off. Sometimes it seemed that she didn't have any desires of her own. That her sexuality was merely a trail in the woods, the unmarked kind that is made by boots trampling tall grass. And the boots belonged to my father.”
― Lisa Taddeo, Three Women

“It's more than fandom when a story touches you so hard that you wish the characters were your family”
― Lisa Taddeo, Three Women

“when quiet people open their mouths the whole world listens.”
― Lisa Taddeo, Three Women

“Later she will text him, Thank you for taking the time, for spending so much time with me today.

If you ask her how long it was she will say, Gee, I'd say it was almost thirty minutes.”
― Lisa Taddeo, Three Women

“It’s the quotidian minutes of our lives that will go on forever, that will tell us who we were.”
― Lisa Taddeo, Three Women

“His distance is captivating and awful. He's trying to control himself and succeeding, and she feels, acutely, how a loved one's self-control can be cruel to the other person.”
― Lisa Taddeo, Three Women

“There is no humanity in humans.”
― Lisa Taddeo, Three Women

“This is an outlandish notion only if you don’t know how a person can destroy you by the simple act of disappearing.”
― Lisa Taddeo, Three Women

“Naturally, my mother died. All mothers do, and they leave behind a trace of their wisdom, their fears, and their desires. Sometimes everything is obvious, marked for burglars. In my case, I needed a black light. There was a beauty in how little my mother wanted. There’s nothing safer than wanting nothing. But being safe in that way, I’ve come to know, does not inure you to illness, pain, and death. Sometimes the only thing it saves is face.”
― Lisa Taddeo, Three Women

“She's never understood exactly what it means to seethe until tonight. She's never understood that pain can so easily feel like the most crippling anger.”
― Lisa Taddeo, Three Women

“But life knows when to throw in a plot twist. It is an idle but seasoned screenwriter, drinking beers alone and cultivating its archery.”
― Lisa Taddeo, Three Women

“The gate that guards the reality of one’s childhood is high and existentially heavy, and merely opening it takes more energy than one expects.”
― Lisa Taddeo, Three Women

“It’s the intangibles that impress her the most. Sex, for Maggie, is in the way he noticed the cut on her arm from the rock. That he was upset because she hadn’t cried out, because she had kept the pain to herself. The way he peeled off his boxer briefs. The foreign softness of certain patches of skin. It would be these things that she would remember for years to come.”
― Lisa Taddeo, Three Women