Tomboyland Quotes

“To live well is to speak one’s truth—even if that truth is just a question.”
― Melissa Faliveno, Tomboyland: Essays

“Is there anywhere that you feel like you can be your full self?” I ask. “No!” she yells, slapping the table and laughing. It’s a huge, contagious laugh, and it cuts through the noise of the bar. A few college kids look over at us. “Never! I don’t think I’ve ever been my full self anywhere. I don’t even think that’s a thing.”
― Melissa Faliveno, Tomboyland: Essays

“Talking about your problems, I think, is something reserved for the upper classes, the educated classes, for families in which a life of the mind is more important than a life of work, and of the body, and of the land.”
― Melissa Faliveno, Tomboyland: Essays

“And then she says something I’ve never heard a gun owner say: “I would give up every one of our guns if the mass shootings would stop. I would never touch another gun again if it meant that that would end.” “Really?” I ask. “Fuck yeah,” she says. “In a heartbeat. I don’t have to have these. Just because it’s my right doesn’t mean it is right.”
― Melissa Faliveno, Tomboyland: Essays

“queer people have developed other ways to create bonds with partners, to parent, to reimagine those structures that have cast them aside. Whatever shape it takes, they build a home and a family of their own.”
― Melissa Faliveno, Tomboyland: Essays

“it’s easier to exist within the structures we’re given than to interrogate them or to do the work required to live outside them. That to ask questions of ourselves might mean having to face some hard truths, and maybe even dismantle our entire way of life. And so we choose not to ask those questions at all.”
― Melissa Faliveno, Tomboyland: Essays

“I felt like I was shedding a skin, like I was reemerging into the world after a long period of sleep. I felt, for perhaps the first time in my life, like my body was my own. I lived in it without shame, without being motivated by a male desire for it. I felt like I had been set free.”
― Melissa Faliveno, Tomboyland: Essays

“We don't have the tools- the language, the education, the resources-- to say some things aloud, to deal in the daylight with our problems. So we keep them to ourselves, and we carry them with us.”
― Melissa Faliveno, Tomboyland: Essays

“I talk to her about my thoughts on grief as inheritance, and tell her that one of my reasons for not having children is not wanting to pass that grief along.”
― Melissa Faliveno, Tomboyland: Essays

“Anyone who has lived for a long time with a lover, and then suddenly does not, will understand what I mean by those crusted bowls, by those solo whiskeys, by the promise of solitude behind a closed door. That to be tethered, so intimately, for so long, and then to find yourself free, is both misery and miracle—a sudden and unlikely dream that brings both darkest despair and the euphoria of liberation. They’ll understand the daily fixations on the ideas of togetherness and separateness; the idea that humans, or at least most of us, pair off and couple up and try as best as we can to stay with one mate for the rest of our lives, fueled in equal parts by love and connection and expectation, and at the root of it, the blind hope that we will never be alone again. And this, we’re told, is what we should want most—a partner, children, family—those bound by sacrament or by state or by blood, who will, we believe with everything we have in our fragile human hearts, never leave us.”
― Melissa Faliveno, Tomboyland: Essays

“And that night, as I watched the digitized faces of my loves halfway across the country, I knew that I would never stay in one place long. That I would remove myself from each place I went, maybe right as it started to feel like home. That I might plant myself in a plot of land just long enough for roots to take hold, then pull myself up from the earth and keep moving. Despite the pain of each new beginning, and maybe also because of it.”
― Melissa Faliveno, Tomboyland: Essays

“Like so many of the systems in which we live, oppression is tricking the oppressed into oppressing each other.”
― Melissa Faliveno, Tomboyland: Essays

“I have come to realize that there are no “bad guys” who exist outside of us. The people who use firearms to harm other people aren’t monsters from another dimension. They are us. We are all good and bad, and some of us just have bad days—maybe you’re at the end of your rope financially, or maybe you’re inconsolably heartbroken, or maybe you’re dealing with an improperly treated mental illness, or maybe you’re dealing with any one of the other thousand ways the world can collapse on you. When this happens, some of us might see reckless use of a firearm as an answer to what’s bothering us. That means that, if you have access to a firearm, your very bad day may give other people unimaginably bad days. That’s never an answer, and I’m removing that possibility from my life and the lives of people who enter my house.”
― Melissa Faliveno, Tomboyland: Essays

“I made my body a weapon; I made my body a war.”
― Melissa Faliveno, Tomboyland: Essays

“She didn’t get defensive, as is our midwestern wont.”
― Melissa Faliveno, Tomboyland: Essays

“We knew that somewhere, beyond this place, the whole huge world was waiting.”
― Melissa Faliveno, Tomboyland: Essays

“Identity isn't what people think of you, " she says. "It's how you think of yourself. It's how you live your life. It's how you carry yourself in the world.”
― Melissa Faliveno, Tomboyland: Essays

“Because, in the end, men are taught to be threatened by those who disrupt their understanding of power. That threat becomes fear, which becomes rage, which becomes violence-- and its main target is the very body that threatens the.m”
― Melissa Faliveno, Tomboyland: Essays

“when I say that what I want to do with my life is create something that maybe, if I’m lucky, will carry on after me, it seems to stem from a desire not dissimilar to wanting children.”
― Melissa Faliveno, Tomboyland: Essays

“I live in a time—one that mothers fought for their daughters to have—in which I can choose who and what my body carries.”
― Melissa Faliveno, Tomboyland: Essays

“in a small, mostly Christian, midwestern town, we learn about love through the lens of the nuclear family. But up close, physical evidence of love can be hard to find. Love looks a lot like service. It looks a lot like sacrifice and duty. It can look like genuine care and devotion, but it rarely looks like affection, and certainly not desire.”
― Melissa Faliveno, Tomboyland: Essays

“Motherhood is not just what girls are expected to do—it’s what they’re trained to want.”
― Melissa Faliveno, Tomboyland: Essays

“for me, carrying a child and giving birth is a notion that’s not just terrifying—it’s one I’m fairly certain would feel like violence against my body.”
― Melissa Faliveno, Tomboyland: Essays

“We find family with those who take care of us, who love us and accept us as we are, who push us to become better versions of ourselves.”
― Melissa Faliveno, Tomboyland: Essays

“queer communities often function in ways that mimic my grandmother’s generation, or my great-grandmother’s before it: with a group of people, not always related by blood, working together communally to take care of one another. For those generations, it meant people who didn’t have a lot giving what they could. It was collective more than it was insular,”
― Melissa Faliveno, Tomboyland: Essays

“The part of me that would like to see guns abolished is motivated by the hope of a future in which mass murders are no longer a part of the American identity. So that we can all feel less afraid in the streets, in our churches and offices and schools. So that fewer people die. But there’s something else at work too. As a woman, I’ve spent most of my life learning that what strength or security I do have can be taken away at any second by a man. I think, on some level, I want to give this feeling to men. I want to take away what makes them feel powerful. I want to strip them of their security like they, for so long, have stripped women of ours. I want them to understand what it feels like to be vulnerable, to be powerless, to be afraid—to be left alone on this earth without armor.”
― Melissa Faliveno, Tomboyland: Essays

“Guns are inherently aggressive, violent, dangerous, and capable of damage—things women aren’t supposed to be.”
― Melissa Faliveno, Tomboyland: Essays

“Those men were never afraid of me. They were never afraid I would seriously hurt them or worse. I was always afraid of them, though, which I think is part of what initiated my rage in the first place—the understanding that I was weaker, more vulnerable, more at risk than they would ever be.”
― Melissa Faliveno, Tomboyland: Essays

“Sometimes it’s easier to laugh about the things that frighten us most.”
― Melissa Faliveno, Tomboyland: Essays

“anger that exists, perhaps, in every woman—because of fear, because of powerlessness, because of the sheer fact of being a woman. She presses it down in her guts and does her best to keep it there. But like most suppressed things, it will eventually find its way out.”
― Melissa Faliveno, Tomboyland: Essays