The Knockout Queen Quotes

“Is there a darker night of the soul than eighth grade?”
― Rufi Thorpe, The Knockout Queen

“I was not confident enough to tell him what I myself barely knew, which is that being true to yourself, even if it makes everyone hate you, even if it makes people want to kill you, is the most radical form of liberty, and when you make contact with something as electric and terrifying as the unadorned truth of yourself, it burns away so many other smaller forms of bondage you weren’t even aware of, so you find yourself irradiated and unencumbered.”
― Rufi Thorpe, The Knockout Queen

“We needed to pretend violence was something we could control. That if you were good and did the right things, it wouldn’t happen to you.”
― Rufi Thorpe, The Knockout Queen

“My mom said it’s different when it’s the woman who’s violent. It strikes people as abnormal. Like, it’s natural for a guy to just ‘lose his temper,’ but if a woman does the same thing, then it’s a sign of something deeper wrong, like psychologically or almost metaphysically.”
― Rufi Thorpe, The Knockout Queen

“But sometimes when you are in a moment, it’s so close to your face, reality, it’s pressed up so close to you, that you just flinch, you react, and then your fate is decided, and all you have done was what you couldn’t help doing, and yet your fate is decided. You’ve done something that can’t be taken back.”
― Rufi Thorpe, The Knockout Queen

“That was the thing that was turning out to be most difficult about being a person. The people I had the most sympathy for were almost never the ones everyone else felt sympathy for.”
― Rufi Thorpe, The Knockout Queen

“that being true to yourself, even if it makes everyone hate you, even if it makes people want to kill you, is the most radical form of liberty, and when you make contact with something as electric and terrifying as the unadorned truth of yourself, it burns away so many other smaller forms of bondage you weren’t even aware of, so you find yourself irradiated and unencumbered.”
― Rufi Thorpe, The Knockout Queen

“What had happened was so big, and we were so used to considering our lives as trivial. We almost didn’t know how to approach it. The largeness of what had happened, of what we had done.”
― Rufi Thorpe, The Knockout Queen

“I loved him impersonally, abstractly, like a character in a book who, by virtue of their very distance from you, their belonging to a different world that you may never yourself enter, enflames your longing all the more.”
― Rufi Thorpe, The Knockout Queen

“It was my otherness that so angered these boys, my unknowableness, my dangerous wrongness. They couldn't understand me and it made them want to extinguish me, and Terrance couldn't understand me and it made him want to save me.”
― Rufi Thorpe, The Knockout Queen

“seemed to be right there, loving the wrong person, betting on the wrong dark horse.”
― Rufi Thorpe, The Knockout Queen

“I was so confused by her. By her naïveté mixed up with her worldliness, by her beauty that was so unattended by vulnerability.”
― Rufi Thorpe, The Knockout Queen

“Fear can change you. It can change you on a physical level. It’s not just feelings, it’s chemical cascades.”
― Rufi Thorpe, The Knockout Queen

“Maybe love would never be enough. Maybe it would never do what we wanted it to do.”
― Rufi Thorpe, The Knockout Queen

“You can hit. Not anybody in this world can really and truly stop you if hitting is how you want to be. But if you do, you’re risking all that love you could have. Because nobody, nobody, nobody is going to stand around all day for you to hit just hoping to give you love in return.”
― Rufi Thorpe, The Knockout Queen

“What else were you supposed to do with pain but polish it until it became something pointy and pretty?”
― Rufi Thorpe, The Knockout Queen

“that being true to yourself, even if it makes everyone hate you, even if it makes people want to kill you, is the most radical form of liberty, and when you make contact with something as electric and terrifying as the unadorned truth of yourself, it burns away so many other smaller forms of bondage you weren’t even aware of, so you find yourself irradiated and unencumbered. That there is something holy in that kind of stubbornness.”
― Rufi Thorpe, The Knockout Queen

“...I loved to look at her. Not for any arrangement of features or gifts of figure, but because she was terribly alive. Like a rabbit or a fox. She was just right there. You could see her breathing, almost feel the blood prickling in her skin, her cells gobbling the sunlight.”
― Rufi Thorpe, The Knockout Queen

“Why did we want so desperately to be seen? I saw her. My eyes were full of her. But it wasn’t enough, and I was no longer hurt by it. The way she loved me wasn’t enough for me either. Maybe love would never be enough. Maybe it would never do what we wanted it to do.”
― Rufi Thorpe, The Knockout Queen

“I had always been a reader, and novels provided me much company throughout my boyhood, but school itself held no appeal. The adults there were using the same bad scripts as social workers, like they were telemarketers cold-calling the youth.”
― Rufi Thorpe, The Knockout Queen

“I was counting on idiot Swanson and his correct sense of how to match a tie to a shirt. It was almost lavish, I reflected, the way Swanson was so obviously only quasi-competent. As a rich, white man, he could afford to let it show, the same way a skinny bitch with Kate Moss hips could wear unflattering avant-garde silhouettes. I trusted Swanson with Bunny’s case when I wouldn’t have let him run a girls’ softball team. He couldn’t have managed two toddlers at a mall. He was nothing but a floppy, spineless concatenation of wine trivia and pretentious sushi-ordering skills dressed up as a human man and walking around.”
― Rufi Thorpe, The Knockout Queen

“With a little editing and cropping, I turned myself into a flesh violin like all the others and placed myself on the marketplace, uncertain how to say the things I needed to say: I can’t host, I have no car, I have no money, I have little experience and what experience I do have is weird and scary, I am a ball of nerves, I am terrified, no one knows who I really am, I think about killing myself daily, I like to read books, please don’t murder me.”
― Rufi Thorpe, The Knockout Queen

“What did a 7-Eleven even sell that wasn’t designed to kill you one way or another?”
― Rufi Thorpe, The Knockout Queen

“At root, I seemed to be upset about the existence of physical power at all. That violence is nothing but another kind of touching.”
― Rufi Thorpe, The Knockout Queen

“You tell me, ‘Oh, you don’t know what it was like, you could never understand the past, it was so hard’—well, you can’t fucking understand the present. You don’t know what it is to grow up in a country that has only ever been at war. To do active shooter drills in fucking kindergarten. To grow up knowing you’ll never make a living wage. You’ll never own a house. That the whole game is rigged, and you’ll work your whole life and have nothing to show for it.”
― Rufi Thorpe, The Knockout Queen

“I was not confident enough to tell him what I myself barely knew, which is that being true to yourself, even if it makes everyone hate you, even if it makes people want to kill you, is the most radical form of liberty, and when you make contact with something as electric and terrifying as the unadorned truth of yourself, it burns away so many other smaller forms of bondage you weren't even aware of, so you find yourself irradiated and unencumbered.”
― Rufi Thorpe, The Knockout Queen

“Tomorrow, I imagined her saying, we'll figure out a more permanent place for your disgusting, diseased morally frightening body, which is too much for my son to handle, my son, who is eighteen years old and who may soon enlist in the army because is willing and able to kill people, but I will refuse you the comfort of your normal bed, on this, one of the worst nights of your life, in order to appease his bigotry and coddle his feelings of superiority to you.”
― Rufi Thorpe, The Knockout Queen