All of This Quotes

“A woman unlearning is the most powerful kind.”
― Rebecca Woolf, All of This: A Memoir of Death and Desire

“What if we all spoke truthfully about our feelings and experiences? What if we weren’t afraid of being chastised for our humanity? What if, we felt safe enough to open the parts of ourselves we have been culturally conditioned to keep closed—didn’t have to call each other brave for saying the things we know to be true, and instead of protecting our families from knowing our pain, allowed them to understand what we risk by saying nothing. So many of us say nothing. Raise our daughters to say nothing. Send the message to our sons, that no matter what they do to us—we will say nothing.”
― Rebecca Woolf, All of This: A Memoir of Death and Desire

“There is something godlike about these moments of release, the irrefutable power of a seizure-like breakdown that ends in holy silence—the falling apart a catalyst for rearrangement.”
― Rebecca Woolf, All of This: A Memoir of Death and Desire

“I think many women are like me. We have been brainwashed to feel so ashamed of our truths that we lie in order to live. About who we love and how. About the kind of love we want in return. We have been lying as a way to preserve ourselves since the beginning of time. So when we tell each other to be honest—woman to woman—what we are really saying is . . . it’s okay. You can tell me your secrets. You can share with me how you stay sane. You can tell me how you lie.”
― Rebecca Woolf, All of This: A Memoir of Death and Desire

“Caretakers have nowhere to put their anger, that’s why.”
― Rebecca Woolf, All of This: A Memoir of Death and Desire

“Grief is nonlinear. It's sneaky and sharp, like a serial killer in a movie where there's no warning.”
― Rebecca Woolf, All of This: A Memoir of Death and Desire

“She, like a mother of all girls, was given a choice. She could either stifle or support her daughter. To be her defendant or prosecutor under the law of patriarchy, a system so ingrained that it was impossible not to stumble upon one of its trip wires. My mother understood that girls became women, that being her daughter was only part of my story, just like being my mother was only part of hers.”
― Rebecca Woolf, All of This: A Memoir of Death and Desire

“How does a mother bring a daughter into the world without wanting to change it?”
― Rebecca Woolf, All of This: A Memoir of Death and Desire

“She read my words and sent them back oxygenated with her understanding.”
― Rebecca Woolf, All of This: A Memoir of Death and Desire

“But just because we can succeed in spite of our wounds does not mean they haven't also crippled us.”
― Rebecca Woolf, All of This: A Memoir of Death and Desire

“Men are called brave for so much less.”
― Rebecca Woolf, All of This: A Memoir of Death and Desire

“Marriage is a labyrinthian on its best days. Even the purest of love stores are infested with idiosyncrasies; the most stable of households, flush with fabrication.”
― Rebecca Woolf, All of This: A Memoir of Death and Desire

“Because contrary to what women are conditioned to think, our truth is not a betrayal but an opening.”
― Rebecca Woolf, All of This: A Memoir of Death and Desire

“I felt like I was going to die. It wasn't just Trump. It was me, too. It was Hal. It was a world of women being eaten alive by men who were repeatedly knighted in spite of bad behavior - women standing by their partners, their femininity a shield for men to be toxic behind.”
― Rebecca Woolf, All of This: A Memoir of Death and Desire

“In my new home, I will not hide. I will not shrink myself nor prioritize people's pleasure over my own. Never again will I live in discomfort for the comfort of everyone else. Before I am even a mother, I will be me.”
― Rebecca Woolf, All of This: A Memoir of Death and Desire

“I watched the video of her shaving her head over and over. Watched her cry, her hair falling down her body in long blonde strands, the slashing of a feminine power which, for years, had contributed to her feelings of powerlessness. The paradox of beauty and all its trappings.”
― Rebecca Woolf, All of This: A Memoir of Death and Desire

“I recently read that the traditional three-act story structure with climax and denouement is reflective of the male orgasm. Which makes sense since climaxing, for men, is the heart of fucking. But that isn’t true for most women. It isn’t for me. I am far more interested in the story behind the sex, the setting and characters—all of the ways we strip down to nothing before entering each other’s bodies. Pleasure, of course, is the point. But so is its proximity to everything else. To truth and discovery, opening up and letting go.”
― Rebecca Woolf, All of This: A Memoir of Death and Desire

“Living in proximity to death will either make you more afraid of dying or detached from its heaviness.”
― Rebecca Woolf, All of This: A Memoir of Death and Desire

“My bedroom becomes filled with souvenirs of our romance. My phone, a paper trail of confessions—our two-way diary.”
― Rebecca Woolf, All of This: A Memoir of Death and Desire

“When I was a child in school, I never understood why we spent so much time learning about things we didn’t need to know when I had so many questions about life—about real life—that went unanswered. Unstudied. Unlearned.”
― Rebecca Woolf, All of This: A Memoir of Death and Desire

“I remember the feeling that even when I felt safe, I knew the waves were there. I could not stay beyond them forever. I would have to be prepared for them to take me under. I would have to hold my breath, and swim. But first, I had to learn to be still. To lean into the movement. To let go. Swimming is dangerous when you’re afraid to float.”
― Rebecca Woolf, All of This: A Memoir of Death and Desire

“Culturally, women have made it a point to ignore the faults and foibles of men posthumously. We have pretended bad marriages were good. Made excuses for bad behavior at the expense of our own safety, gaslighting ourselves into oblivion. Out of fear, denial, patriarchy. There are so many reasons to stay, we explain to ourselves in the shower. Or on the car ride home from school drop off. Or in bed, unable to sleep. But none of those reasons involve our happiness. Not directly.”
― Rebecca Woolf, All of This: A Memoir of Death and Desire

“In the beginning, I only knew what I was taught. Told. Read. I was shy in public until I learned by trial and error with my Barbies how to be cool enough to be accepted into The Dreamhouse. If my instincts opposed whatever story I had been told, I ignored them. Buried them in diaries with plastic padlocks. Kept them to myself, ashamed of my darkness, of stories with more than one ending.”
― Rebecca Woolf, All of This: A Memoir of Death and Desire

“Communication made it possible to experiment with different types of people and scenarios. Sometimes we pushed it too far and we’d have to redefine our boundaries, but it always resulted in a deeper closeness and better understanding of ourselves and each other.”
― Rebecca Woolf, All of This: A Memoir of Death and Desire

“Compersion is when you feel joyful for a person you love when they are feeling joy and love with someone else. It goes against everything we’re taught about “cheaters” and “jealousy,” but to me, it is beautiful. Generous. Sacred. It contradicts every patriarchal, traditionally pushed ideal. Perhaps this is why it felt so equitable. Loving. We were making up rules up as we went. We were also breaking them, changing them, learning how to live without them within social circles that upheld them mightily. Together.”
― Rebecca Woolf, All of This: A Memoir of Death and Desire

“We were on the same page. And then we were on the same page again. And again and again until I lost track of all the things we believed in that were the same—an entire book of things. Most importantly, a mutual love language: freedom.”
― Rebecca Woolf, All of This: A Memoir of Death and Desire

“It was why free will was so important to me. I knew in my depths how vulnerable I was—how easy I fell in (and out) of love with people and how out of control I felt when I did. I knew I was capable of hurting others. Of lying and cheating and becoming disinterested in putting in the kind of work long-term relationships need to thrive.”
― Rebecca Woolf, All of This: A Memoir of Death and Desire

“It takes a certain kind of understanding and acknowledgment to welcome interactions, sexual or otherwise, knowing they will likely go nowhere—that they will live within the walls of momentary bliss. Maybe because every time we do this, we better learn to let go. We say it’s okay to die. It’s okay to lose. It’s okay to exist in one moment and then move forward into another one. An absorption of pulse. The crash like a heartbeat. Ephemeral love is also love. It’s okay to attach yourself to me and then let go.”
― Rebecca Woolf, All of This: A Memoir of Death and Desire

“This is what home feels like for me. Like revisiting a foreign country where you can now speak the language, I am back where I started, but this time I know how to communicate my needs. How to prioritize my pleasure. How to walk away from the kind of men who will never deserve my love and also the ones who do.”
― Rebecca Woolf, All of This: A Memoir of Death and Desire

“In the beginning, I wanted to hide the proof that I was, indeed, a mother. But in time, I took the fingers of strangers and traced the line for them. If you want to look at me, look at this, too. So that they might know that I can exist in two different kinds of skin at once. That I am my own kind of woman regardless of how many children I once wore inside my flesh. That carrying life and expelling it into the world isn’t the only reason my body is a body. That there’s an entire organ whose sole purpose is pleasure. Here, give me your fingers so that I can trace them against that, too. In the thirty-minute drive home from his house to mine, I get to talking to the woman driving my Lyft. I am always relieved when I find out my driver is a woman. For myself, sure, but also for her. I think about all the drunk men she might have picked up instead. It’s after 2 a.m. on a Friday night, after all. Rush hour for the last-call boys.”
― Rebecca Woolf, All of This: A Memoir of Death and Desire