Motherthing Quotes

“Maybe touching someone is the kindest thing you can do; making a person feel like it's okay to touch them, that they're touchable and not disgusting, is the easiest and best way to make a person feel good in the world.”
― Ainslie Hogarth, Motherthing

“Winter never lets you forget you’re alive. Maybe that’s why it makes people sad.”
― Ainslie Hogarth, Motherthing

“Eating, love’s natural, bloody conclusion that can never, ever be indulged, because then the thing you love is destroyed. And maybe not destroying the thing you love, resisting that impulse, is the highest expression of love.”
― Ainslie Hogarth, Motherthing

“Boys are boys and they do what they want. Women want things too sometimes, but mostly they're just warm sensory boards for men to tweak and rub and learn about themselves and the world through.”
― Ainslie Hogarth, Motherthing

“What if Mrs. Bondy had been my mother instead? What might I have inherited from her? Good things. Maybe I would have wanted to be like her instead of how it is with my mother — where everything I do is to try to not be like her. Which is basically the same as becoming her in a way, how a shadow of your hand is both your hand and its opposite.”
― Ainslie Hogarth, Motherthing

“I guess that’s what rage is: the point where your words fail the power of your emotions.”
― Ainslie Hogarth, Motherthing

“Women on daytime murder shows are always strangled or stabbed or chopped up for no reason at all, except that they're women, I guess, and to some men that means they deserve it. Women are lucky to get shot, really. I'd rather be shot than strangled. Thank you, Son of Sam, you were uncharacteristically good to us.”
― Ainslie Hogarth, Motherthing

“The work of women's clothes never more important than at the beginning and the end of their lives when it's tasked with broadcasting, as loudly as possible: please don't try to have sex with me.”
― Ainslie Hogarth, Motherthing

“For example, my name is Abigail and people call me Abby very easily and it does this thing to me where I like them right away. Makes me feel like I know them already and that they like me already. That we’re close and I can trust them. Like, even if I were speaking to some prisoner through thick glass, a giant villain with a million face tattoos and a big scar from the corner of his mouth to his ear, if he called me Abby, I might smuggle something in my vagina for him next time I visited, keep him liking me because now that I’ve got him liking me, he’s not so bad. Now that I’ve got him liking me, I need it to live.”
― Ainslie Hogarth, Motherthing

“He told me that suffering makes a person special, fills a soul with angular gems of transcendent knowledge, so many perspectives contained within each one.”
― Ainslie Hogarth, Motherthing

“We are each other’s personal pan pizza from Pizza Hut. Made for each other.”
― Ainslie Hogarth, Motherthing

“I guess that’s what rage is: the point where your words fail the power of your emotions. Maybe there can be happiness rage and sadness rage. I am in love rage with Ralph and sometimes it hurts so bad I could knock a patio chair over like that sloppy, gaping fuckhole, that rotten fucking fuck-ass boyfriend did.”
― Ainslie Hogarth, Motherthing

“Ralph was being pummeled by the full typhoon of his love for her, one of life’s cruelest tricks, that the extent of this love waits to reveal itself.”
― Ainslie Hogarth, Motherthing

“I bubble again with blinding-hot, spine-severing cumshitkill.”
― Ainslie Hogarth, Motherthing

“He told me that night about his darkness: depression. How he got sometimes, how it was physical: waves of pain drowning him, or not him exactly, but the thing inside him that made him him, and all he could think about was destroying the vessel, the sinews, muscles, pulses, that kept him tethered to the pain, bisecting the vessel’s veins like a vanilla bean, burrowing a bullet into his brain.”
― Ainslie Hogarth, Motherthing

“A Good Woman recognizes that you can be good and bad at once. A Good Woman can acknowledge your humanity while recognizing the fact that you also need to die. That's why it's hard to be a Good Woman. That's why we're not all good women, are we, Janet?”
― Ainslie Hogarth, Motherthing

“Back in the ICU waiting room old Opal-eye blinks, turns her head, fixes her gaze on me, like she knows what I did, what’s hiding in my pocket, and a cruel thought violates the folds of my mind, residue left over from the evil impulse: I got the ring anyway, Laura, it’s mine now, isn’t it, now that you’re dead. I press my pocket, feel the ring’s undeniable there-ness. I need to close myself off to mischievous impulses and bad thoughts. But it’s hard because no one ever taught me how.”
― Ainslie Hogarth, Motherthing

“Humans like to put their mouths on the things they love.”
― Ainslie Hogarth, Motherthing

“She looks so much like a person hurt beyond belief, with her rubbed-to-fuzz hair and her screaming and her blistered eyes. Nothing else matters but her pain, the biggest, loudest thing in the world, unimaginable, a way that people only ever expect to feel maybe once in their life, if ever at all, and maybe never even really recover from. She gets this way all the time. Ripped to shreds when a relationship ends. Is this real? Could this possibly be real? Can real grief even happen this many times to a single human body?”
― Ainslie Hogarth, Motherthing

“Ralph.” He’s marching ahead of me, warm huffs caught and held by the cold. Winter never lets you forget you’re alive. Maybe that’s why it makes people sad.”
― Ainslie Hogarth, Motherthing

“Unceremoniously absorbed by the great homogenous colony, the leaking, aching, voiceless elderly, looking and sounding and treated the same no matter what they’d accomplished before they started shitting themselves again.”
― Ainslie Hogarth, Motherthing

“Lamb, Laura. Survived by son Ralph Lamb (Abigail) and no one else. No other soul in the world had tethered itself to hers by choice, and that should tell you something. She won’t really be missed by her strange, scabby neighbor, or the inanimate objects she carted to the casino and worshipped like little gods. She might have been missed by her daughter-in-law, who was ready to love her like a mother, who could have loved a rolled-up pair of socks if she had to, who did love a fucking couch, for Christ sake. But Laura didn’t want that. Despite her faults, Laura Lamb managed to raise the most genuinely good person in the entire world, and for that Abby will always love her, even though the woman was honestly a horrible fucking bitch.”
― Ainslie Hogarth, Motherthing

“I feel a sudden pang of sadness that robots will never get to experience this kind of pride in their work.”
― Ainslie Hogarth, Motherthing

“Growing old, Janet, people just don’t understand how difficult it really is, your body snatching control from your brain, taking over completely, dragging you kicking and screaming toward death. It’s a sort of horrible slow-motion autopilot, and there’s nothing you can do about it. Imagine—imagine jumping off a building and then time all but stops, and you’re falling so slowly, regretting having jumped, wishing you could just be back on the ledge, miserable with everyone else, but you can’t, it’s over, you have to come to terms with this part while it’s happening, and it’s so hard, the physical pain, the indignities, it’s just so hard, no one really knows, not yet, and that’s what I do, you understand?”
― Ainslie Hogarth, Motherthing

“Women are lucky to get shot, really. I’d rather be shot than strangled. Thank you, Son of Sam, you were uncharacteristically good to us.”
― Ainslie Hogarth, Motherthing

“She’s going to be such a beautiful pregnant woman. It makes me want to cry. And stab her.”
― Ainslie Hogarth, Motherthing

“I hear the TV on in the living room and I know that Ralph isn’t going into work again today, because this is our life now: Ralph is an unemployed madman, and I’m his worthless familiar, playing the dangerous game of dipping in and out of his delusion like it’s a warm, soothing tub of ORGANICA.”
― Ainslie Hogarth, Motherthing

“You’ve endured the suffering that makes mystics; that fills them with gems of transcendent wisdom. Not mall gems. Good gems. Remember what Ralph said, what suffering is: throbbing little irritants, sand in an oyster, rubbing and rubbing and rubbing into beautiful, glittering lozenges of magic and you’re full of them.”
― Ainslie Hogarth, Motherthing

“MAYBE I’VE DEVELOPED A SUPERPOWER, which is that I can see ghosts, but only when I’m shit-faced. I am the Incredible Drinking Woman. If I’m going to defeat the Evil Ghost, I have to keep getting hammered. In the first issue, titled Failure to Thrive, the need to be constantly drunk kills my unborn child. She drowns in my womb, a bog of digested coolers, no mouth yet to scream, but enough flipper to author a spectacular final thrash, made more dramatic by a vacuous, sizzling aftermath. Now this is personal, says my dialogue bubble, defeating the ghost no longer just some obligation thrust upon me by circumstance, but a smoldering need to exact revenge for killing my Cal.”
― Ainslie Hogarth, Motherthing

“Okay, what’s wrong with being cautious, by the way? I’m asking your opinion, as a woman, what is so unattractive about caution? And what kind of a world have we created that caution should be mocked and, you know, deemed physically unattractive. That’s stupid. Just, from a survival-of-the-fittest perspective, turning caution into a quality you don’t want to mate with, that has to be some kind of bug we’ve introduced into the evolutionary process.”
― Ainslie Hogarth, Motherthing