Blow Your House Down Quotes

“This is what it is to have bitten the apple, and to understand for the first time why female desire and knowledge are the most feared and demonized forces in history. This is what it’s like to be a destroyer of worlds: that woman, that apple, that serpent, all at once. Even if your Eden was partially imaginary, this is what it’s like to watch the dream of it fade forever into the mist and to want to turn back the clock, to want to return, but also to never want to return, to ache to keep running. This is what it’s like to have feared your entire life becoming your martyr of a mother, and to instead have become the monster under your children’s bed. This is what it’s like to choose love.”
― Gina Frangello, Blow Your House Down: A Story of Family, Feminism, and Treason

“How do we measure a life’s worth? In laughter? In orgasms? In money? In how often we have been photographed? In children borne or raised? In the number of continents on which we have made love? In number of books published? In latest versions of iPads and iPhones? In jazz albums filling a giant trunk in the basement? In years? We are all specks of dust against the specter of Time. Is ninety years so different from forty in the scheme of things? We are all the walking dead of history.”
― Gina Frangello, Blow Your House Down: A Story of Family, Feminism, and Treason

“grief is not a thing that ends. Sometimes, though, it cracks us open and exposes the places we’ve hidden, and that can be a kind of gift.”
― Gina Frangello, Blow Your House Down: A Story of Family, Feminism, and Treason

“What happens when self-erasure has been the norm for so long that the You cannot find its way back to I?”
― Gina Frangello, Blow Your House Down: A Story of Family, Feminism, and Treason

“There is only one way to tell the truth, but there are myriad ways to live a lie.”
― Gina Frangello, Blow Your House Down: A Story of Family, Feminism, and Treason

“do not believe in divine retribution or karma or any hand of god or fate that takes a sentient interest in the happenings of our world. But what I know: there are circumstances that unearth you irrevocably, that break you, that leave you never again an unbroken whole.”
― Gina Frangello, Blow Your House Down: A Story of Family, Feminism, and Treason

“I grew up with the mistaken impression that cleverness could exempt me from anything, but middle age teaches nothing if not the lesson that nobody is exempt.”
― Gina Frangello, Blow Your House Down: A Story of Family, Feminism, and Treason

“What does it mean to love by degree? What does this say, too, about my place in my own children's love chain? Is this the cycle of life, then? To be prepared to be thrown under the bus, if necessary, by those you value most in the world?”
― Gina Frangello, Blow Your House Down: A Story of Family, Feminism, and Treason

“In what ways does the "protection" of a man grant a woman the freedom to break societal rules, so long as the one rule she does not break is her dependence on said man for her safety and to sanctify her appropriateness as a parent, as a human being?”
― Gina Frangello, Blow Your House Down: A Story of Family, Feminism, and Treason

“Maxine Hong Kingston writes that in Chinese tradition, sometimes mothers would loudly proclaim their children ugly or stupid so that harm would befall them-so that the ghosts would not think them worthy of stealing.”
― Gina Frangello, Blow Your House Down: A Story of Family, Feminism, and Treason

“I am the oldest generation from here on out, the imperfect archetype whose successes and mistakes my children will strive to emulate or avoid. I am the one who will ultimately recede next, in order to make room for the splendor of them.”
― Gina Frangello, Blow Your House Down: A Story of Family, Feminism, and Treason

“I am proud because I understand that there are times when self-preservation is more important than sentiment, especially when one is a mother, and I could not afford to be perpetually devoured from the inside out, surrendering my hours and days and weeks and months to this turbulent anxiety over whether some man would ever fully “choose me.”
― Gina Frangello, Blow Your House Down: A Story of Family, Feminism, and Treason

“Even the best cellmate on earth cannot change the fact that you are in prison;”
― Gina Frangello, Blow Your House Down: A Story of Family, Feminism, and Treason

“We are all only one strange leap away from becoming inconceivable to our former selves.”
― Gina Frangello, Blow Your House Down: A Story of Family, Feminism, and Treason

“The dead don’t judge, but they also don’t gratify, don’t give permission.”
― Gina Frangello, Blow Your House Down: A Story of Family, Feminism, and Treason

“Most of the ways to fail a person involve trying not to fail somebody else.”
― Gina Frangello, Blow Your House Down: A Story of Family, Feminism, and Treason

“The dirt is coming for us all as we free-fall. This much I know: that eventually, we all have to start screaming well before we hit the ground, so the women below us will understand when to scatter, when to take cover, when it is safe to come back outside and try again to change the world. So that future generations will know, from the echo of our voices, never to stop watching the sky.”
― Gina Frangello, Blow Your House Down: A Story of Family, Feminism, and Treason

“And: there are so many paths we could have traveled—so many other people we could have been. Staying would not have rendered me weak—an inconsequential June Cleaver—just as cheating didn’t make me a coldhearted monster. The clean reduction of a woman to any prime number is always a lie, even if some lies are prettier than others.”
― Gina Frangello, Blow Your House Down: A Story of Family, Feminism, and Treason

“I’m so repressed even my dreams aren’t exciting.”
― Gina Frangello, Blow Your House Down: A Story of Family, Feminism, and Treason

“There are too few words for who and what human beings are to each other. Language is a territory still mostly uncharted. We are the cartographers, every day, still mapping the human heart.”
― Gina Frangello, Blow Your House Down: A Story of Family, Feminism, and Treason

“What is the line between the living female body and the dysfunctional portrait that has been drawn of it in literature and psychology and medicine?”
― Gina Frangello, Blow Your House Down: A Story of Family, Feminism, and Treason

“The ways in which women both love and support one another, and mistrust and betray and undermine one another, may be the most complex thing in the universe.”
― Gina Frangello, Blow Your House Down: A Story of Family, Feminism, and Treason

“Fear makes people lawless. If indifference is hate’s opposite, then compassion is fear’s.”
― Gina Frangello, Blow Your House Down: A Story of Family, Feminism, and Treason

“The war on menopausal sexuality is, of course, nothing new—no breast cancer required to enter. According to Elaine Showalter’s The Female Malady, in Victorian England women who expressed an interest in sex after menopause were ridiculed and derided, and their husbands were advised to “withhold” any sexual stimulation. Some pioneering doctors “treated” oversexed (by which I mean sexed-at-all) middle-aged women’s malady of desire with “a course of injections of ice water into the rectum, introduction of ice into the vagina, and leeching of the labia and the cervix.” It’s no doubt not unrelated that, when women tried to avail themselves of the Matrimonial Causes Act of 1857, one doctor began performing clitoridectomies after which, Showalter notes, the patients each “returned humbly” to their husbands. The squelching of women’s desire has always been one of the main tentacles of patriarchy, and nothing squelches desire more effectively (well, sparing clitoridectomy) than sending a woman a clear message that she will never be desirable again.”
― Gina Frangello, Blow Your House Down: A Story of Family, Feminism, and Treason

“Of course, medical marijuana and CBD are not covered by insurance, and a tiny bottle of CBD oil costs about $100. Norco, covered by insurance, costs absolutely nothing. Despite an epidemic of abuse and overdose (the fatalities of which are actually highly linked to the prescription of fentanyl, a drug that should be illegal outside of hospice situations), my opiate painkiller was “on the house” of my medical insurance, whereas THC is a Class 1 substance that could not only potentially influence a custody case but put a serious dent in my family finances.”
― Gina Frangello, Blow Your House Down: A Story of Family, Feminism, and Treason

“When we stop drawing a line between moral failings and evil, between the very things that make us human and those that take away our humanity—when we lose sight of mercy and mistake it for weakness, all is lost.”
― Gina Frangello, Blow Your House Down: A Story of Family, Feminism, and Treason

“We are all in the end those rhesus monkeys who cling to the soft plush mother for comfort, ignoring the food on the wire monkey until we starve. Other people can hurt us more than our bodies can.”
― Gina Frangello, Blow Your House Down: A Story of Family, Feminism, and Treason

“What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life?” Muriel Rukeyser wrote in 1968, the year of my birth. “The world would split open.”
― Gina Frangello, Blow Your House Down: A Story of Family, Feminism, and Treason

“And so it is going to be on me to keep the faith that I am not so low that everybody is better off without me, including my children. It is going to be on me to find the faith that Martin’s ex-wife could not find—the faith that I still matter, even if I am no longer any man’s Most Important Priority, even if I am not the mother I thought I’d be. Even if the only reason I can find to justify my continued existence is that the trauma of me alive is far lesser than the trauma of me dead; even if only for the sake of my children because I have lost any sense of myself as deserving of anything, this becomes the moment—alone in what was once my marital bed while my children sleep downstairs—that I refuse to join the endless body count of women lost to History. This dark night, I resolve to believe, irrevocably and whatever the cost, that I deserve to live.”
― Gina Frangello, Blow Your House Down: A Story of Family, Feminism, and Treason

“This, I came to understand, was what freedom tasted like. It wasn’t a heady illusion in the safety of a time-shared bed, seeking the approval of the person whose heart you are breaking. It is being willing to have your own heart broken and not blaming the outcome on anyone. It is being an orphan, and love not being an obligation or prescription, but always a risky, transformative choice.”
― Gina Frangello, Blow Your House Down: A Story of Family, Feminism, and Treason