Notes on a Silencing Quotes

“It’s so simple, what happened at St. Paul’s. It happens all the time. First, they refused to believe me. Then they shamed me. Then they silenced me. On balance, if this is a girl’s trajectory from dignity to disappearance, I say it is better to be a slut than to be silent. I believe, in fact, that the slur slut carries within it, Trojan-horse style, silence as its true intent. That the opposite of slut is not virtue but voice.”
― Lacy Crawford, Notes on a Silencing

“transcribe experience so other people would understand. The work of telling is essential, and it is not enough. There is always the danger that the energy of the injustice will exhaust itself in the revelation—that we will be horrified but remain unchanged. The reason for this, I suspect, is that these are stories we all already know. A girl was assaulted. A boy was molested. The producer, the judge, the bishop, the boss. To hear these stories spoken aloud is jarring, but not because it causes us to reconsider who we are and how we are organized. It is only when power is threatened that power responds.”
― Lacy Crawford, Notes on a Silencing

“So I’ve written what happened, exactly as I remember. It is an effort of accompaniment as much as it is of witness: to go back to that girl leaving the boys’ room on an October night, sneakers landing on the sandy path, and walk with her all the way home.”
― Lacy Crawford, Notes on a Silencing: A Memoir

“Their first violation was erasure.”
― Lacy Crawford, Notes on a Silencing: A Memoir

“Why don't victims kick or bite or scream? Because we're not in a horror movie; we're in our lives.”
― Lacy Crawford, Notes on a Silencing: A Memoir

“What I wanted was to find some way to release my peers from their shame. I wanted to show them the secret letter buried in each of their files, the one where the institution aligned against them determined how to keep them quiet, this blueprint of patriarchal silence. So that voices like the vice-rector’s—you are bad, your family must not look closely here—will roll off them and onto the grass, and they will tell, and tell, and tell.”
― Lacy Crawford, Notes on a Silencing

“We were blessed with excellence, and excellently blessed, and our schoolwork and sports teams and choirs and clubs and shoulders thrummed with Calvinist confidence that is actually a threat: if you do not become spectacular, it means you are not us.”
― Lacy Crawford, Notes on a Silencing: A Memoir

“In bearing witness, we’re trying to correct a theft of power via a story. But power and stories, while deeply interconnected, are not the same things. One is rock, the other is water.
Over time, long periods of time, water always wins.
What I want to know, even now, is: how?”
― Lacy Crawford, Notes on a Silencing: A Memoir

“What interests me is not what happened. I remember. I have always remembered.
What interests me is the near impossibility of telling what happened in a way that discharges its power.”
― Lacy Crawford, Notes on a Silencing: A Memoir

“Youd be surprised what a kid could find unmanageable to say”
― Lacy Crawford, Notes on a Silencing: A Memoir

“I did not intimate or tease, or do the things people do when they claim to want to keep a secret but really just want to seduce with the lovely shape of their almost-telling.”
― Lacy Crawford, Notes on a Silencing

“Walking the path to classes, I had its beat in my heard: Now get up and go. Now get up and go. There was no city, but I substituted a hazy notion of future. I liked to think there was a direction for me, however much solitude it might demand, however much loneliness.”
― Lacy Crawford, Notes on a Silencing: A Memoir

“Around this time, in the first days and weeks after the assault, I became aware of a curious mind's-eye perspective I had never held before. I saw myself as if from high above, moving across campus, going from dorm to Schoolhouse and back again...
I watched myself as a tiny figure being pulled in, as though I were about to be swallowed up.”
― Lacy Crawford, Notes on a Silencing: A Memoir

“Especially good gossip, no matter how outlandish contains the sense of its own inevitability. How unlikely I was to have become, of a single night, a prep-school porn star! The illogic of my fall made its own case for truth. STRANGE THINGS. SHE JUST CRACKED. I wondered, when everyone was so quick to believe what the boys claimed, if this proved that it was my fault. There was something ugly that they had all seen in me, but I had not.”
― Lacy Crawford, Notes on a Silencing: A Memoir

“I was the older of my parents' two children, their girl, born to a small family in a northern suburb of Chicago, and while Mom and Dad would never have said, precisely, that St. Paul's would be the making of me, when we had toured the place the autumn I was thirteen, my parents had been so undone that I had seen them, for the first and only time in my life, holding hands. I understood this to be my chance to find my way into my own life. Into HISTORY. Do you see?”
― Lacy Crawford, Notes on a Silencing: A Memoir

“Teachers refused to punish me, which is another way of saying that they refused to look after me.”
― Lacy Crawford, Notes on a Silencing: A Memoir

“I did not turn around again. I heard their enormous sneakers scuffing the tile and I kept a measured pace as I pressed out the doors and walked down the hill toward Chapel and class, moving the way every bullied child in history has ever walked, eyes stinging, back on fire, wishing to vanish into another world.”
― Lacy Crawford, Notes on a Silencing: A Memoir

“Tom buchannan had his polo ponies brought up from Lake Forest," I told Stewart. I'd read Gatsby right around the time my family moved from a small development to a larger home on a main road, the summer I was twelve...

I liked to imagine Daisy's horses had been stabled there, beneath the trees I could see from my window - enormous oak and ash crowns that moved softly at night.

I saw each clutch of forest and granite escarpment for the first and last time, dignified it with my seeing, and bade it all farewell. St Paul's just wasn't going to work out. I was thinking about the ponies, was my problem. I wanted to understand them (How were they chosen? Who loaded them into the trailers? Who rode east with them? Who greeted them when they arrived?) when I should have been, like everyone, smitten with Daisy, and the whisperings and the champagne and the stars.”
― Lacy Crawford, Notes on a Silencing: A Memoir

“I loved him for finally calling out one tiny corner of the vast labyrinth of hierarchies that ruled the world of St. Paul's school. Status was our first language, one that had to be learned, instantly, if you did not arrive fluent (and many students did); and it functioned like some primitive, instinctive form of communication beneath the surface of every exchange. We knew the grammar of privilege and could infer from silence where the greatest power lay.

You could not discuss the hierarchy, and in any case we had no words for it. In fact, where it held sway, there were no words.”
― Lacy Crawford, Notes on a Silencing: A Memoir

“I was more interested in my mother's report of how he had bitten into a chocolate truffle at a dinner party and, finding half a pistachio inside, excused himself with epinephrine before he died. It was a startling example of an adult's vulnerability, which I did not often see. It was also, of course, a story about what a person might do without disrupting a dinner party - about what manners could conceal.”
― Lacy Crawford, Notes on a Silencing: A Memoir

“There was always the sense thereafter of catching up to where my parents felt we belonged.”
― Lacy Crawford, Notes on a Silencing: A Memoir

“Blue satin bras and killing pits were ever after twinned in my mind. The one, in its self-conscious cupidity, limned the depths to the other. All at once I appreciated the depravity and banality of the human animal. I was positively wearied by wisdom. Shyla's bra, my friends and I discussed at length. The horror page stayed secret in my mind. Silly gorgeous girls, they weren't ready for that sort of knowledge. Not yet and maybe not ever.”
― Lacy Crawford, Notes on a Silencing: A Memoir

“Walking the path to classes, I had its beat in my head: Now get up and go. Now get up and go. There was no city, but I substituted a hazy notion of future. I liked to think there was a direction for me, however much solitude it might demand, however much loneliness.”
― Lacy Crawford, Notes on a Silencing: A Memoir

“That my reputation vis-a-vis their girlfriends was my concern tells me that a physical assualt, whatever form that was to take, was assured. And second, that nobody would believe it was my fault.”
― Lacy Crawford, Notes on a Silencing: A Memoir

“You have to understand I told him," adding detail he would not have known, "that these guys had girlfriends. Beautiful, athletic women.."

My friend interrupted my, "Cool," she said, nailing it. "They were the cool girls."

But they too were used, as surely as the threat of the faculty member catching me there, to lure me in and silence me afterward. The leap of self preservation my mind made when the boys pushed me down was that no one could ever know about whatever this thing was that was going to happen, BECAUSE THEY HAD GIRLFRIENDS.”
― Lacy Crawford, Notes on a Silencing: A Memoir

“We found my name. Under my picture someone had written: "If a fart had a face.”
― Lacy Crawford, Notes on a Silencing: A Memoir

“I know I'm stacking the deck in my defense. Which I should not have to do, because I was a minor and the boys were eighteen and there were TWO OF THEM - one of whom was on that night almost a foot taller and hundred pounds heavier than me. I was a virgin. They pushed me down and -

I'm doing it again.”
― Lacy Crawford, Notes on a Silencing: A Memoir

“I imagined our adolescent channels of envy and rapport to be the headwaters of the adult currents of law and policy and finance and education and the arts that you could not, once they were deep and running fast, jump into if you missed them now.”
― Lacy Crawford, Notes on a Silencing: A Memoir

“We got sick a lot. For the most part we ignored it. The ladies at the infirmary, sweet and ineffective, distributed aspirin in pleated cups. I didn't bother anyway, what would I have said? "I was impaled by two dicks, ma'am - may I please have a lozenge?”
― Lacy Crawford, Notes on a Silencing: A Memoir