The Men Quotes

“Not everyone is meant to change the world. We let the world change around us. We let it die if it will. We live small lives, constrained by habit and fear.”
― Sandra Newman, The Men

“In that moment, I was struck by how profoundly a scene was changed by the removal of a masculine element. It felt very sweet and fantastical: a world of lambs with no wolves. At the same time, it was oddly reminiscent of a rebel encampment on the eve of a raid.”
― Sandra Newman, The Men

“And in a way, we were just watching television through the fall and rise of civilizations, as many other people do. We watched The Men while North and South Korea were unified, while the first female cardinals chose the first female pope. The day Evangelyne first drew ahead of the Republican in a three-way poll, we were watching The Men, and we were watching when she made the “For the Children” speech that cemented her position in second place. There were wildfires in Canada and drought in South America; refugees fled from cities where infrastructure had failed without male workers; and we watched men running through the dead land. Power plants and oil refineries closed worldwide from lack of skilled workers and diminished demand, and a climate agreement was reached that reflected these new, more permissive realities. Fish populations rebounded in the Atlantic and moose appeared in the streets of Moscow. People talked unironically about Gaea, Themyscira, Eden. We five watched our screen. Spring turned into summer, and now our ComPA guards ranged freely throughout the house. They cooked elaborate feasts in the kitchen, fucked in the beds, spoiled the dog with treats. Laughter rose outside as they splashed in the pool and ran through sprinklers, young and cloudless. It was as if a new, pure generation had arisen in the months since we’d started watching. And we were watching when an objectively different generation was born, the first human beings conceived without sperm, without sin.”
― Sandra Newman, The Men

“Some men are instinctively compassionate, as women are; this was something I'd forgotten and it took my breath away.”
― Sandra Newman, The Men

“Here she told the story of our first meeting: how I’d run away from her in the street, and she’d felt like she was going crazy. She’d given chase and run me down as if she could finally corner whiteness, confront it and make it face its lies. When I agreed to withdraw from the class, she assumed it was just my way of escaping the class of scary Black girls. For that minute, she was in the dystopian world of the old Nation of Islam, where whites were perversities, the botched results of a malign experiment, eternal antagonists to real human beings.”
― Sandra Newman, The Men

“Doors and windows opened along the street, and women poured out, appearing on apartment balconies and porches and spilling onto the sidewalk singing. It was now revealed that this was a Hispanic neighborhood. For a moment, Ruth thought she was the only white person and felt a shameful jolt of racial paranoia.”
― Sandra Newman, The Men