The Glow Quotes

“She sometimes sounded like a walking pro-anorexia forum.”
― Jessie Gaynor, The Glow

“Jesus Christ. Jane thought about the number of men she’d fucked in gratitude for compliments (or approximate compliments; she once gave a guy a hand job because he said her hair looked long). It was the flattery, of course, but not only that. Jane wanted the truth, too. She needed more information about her parts, and their quality. She wanted to be a reliable narrator. She couldn’t decide how to live in the world until she knew what kind of person she was.”
― Jessie Gaynor, The Glow

“She had been a boy-crazy kid who became a man-mentally-ill adult.”
― Jessie Gaynor, The Glow

“She tried to release herself from herself, her incessant, terrible thoughts, the thousands of small badnesses that made her up.”
― Jessie Gaynor, The Glow

“She now swaddled herself in muted natural fibers that both draped and clung, and looked like they might be suitable for either yoga or pottery or attending a celebrity home birth but were, in fact, suitable for almost nothing besides projecting an aura of self-satisfaction.”
― Jessie Gaynor, The Glow

“She buys organic when it’s easy and she’s thinking of going vegan for a month, just to see how it feels. She goes to yoga a few times a week and she doesn’t lift weights because she’s afraid of getting too bulky. She’s on a diet, but she doesn’t call it a diet, she calls it eating clean. She’s disappointed with her life, but she’s certain the problem is her. She’s privileged but she feels powerless.”
― Jessie Gaynor, The Glow

“Throughout her life, Jane had tried to believe in things—astrology, Catholicism, change, herself, intermittent fasting, love, life after love, mindfulness, Pilates, poetry, recycling, retinol, tarot. Her belief in Cass’s power felt urgent in an unfamiliar way. She willed Cass to understand that although she didn’t believe zucchini was any better than eggplant, or that ice water was reckless, she believed the power was real.”
― Jessie Gaynor, The Glow

“You were told that your employment at Relevancy was being terminated, and your response was to accuse your former supervisor of sexual harassment. To that objective observer, this might sound quite a bit like a threat. And frankly, Jane, as a woman, as a feminist, I’m a little disgusted by the implication of that. Now, I know you’re upset, so I’d like to give you the opportunity to do the right thing here.”
― Jessie Gaynor, The Glow

“I’m sure she’ll be happy to know her PR person is slandering the company she built from nothing. You know, there’s a special place in hell for women who tear down other women’s business ventures.”
― Jessie Gaynor, The Glow

“She used to tell guys she had daddy issues to be funny, but she stopped when she realized only the terrible ones were ever going to laugh.”
― Jessie Gaynor, The Glow

“Her mother told her often how much Dave admired Jane’s social conscience and work ethic, which was nice even though it struck her as complete bullshit because Dave’s daughter was a teacher at a therapeutic preschool for children with PTSD.”
― Jessie Gaynor, The Glow

“Good skin signaled discipline and prosperity and health and virtuous contentment and, above all, being cared for, like that rich infant, whose good fortune had been assured from the moment of implantation in the office of a very expensive reproductive specialist.”
― Jessie Gaynor, The Glow

“Every newly announced engagement or cohabitation or even accidental pregnancy that crossed her feeds—no matter how tenuous her connection to the parties involved—was a personal attack.”
― Jessie Gaynor, The Glow

“of something only her mother noticed. She would study her straight nose, which sometimes looked enormous and sometimes normal, lips that were thin but not skinny, a chin that didn’t recede into her neck, eyes that were average in everything but their bright blue. She knew which girls were the pretty ones and which ones were the ugly ones, but the in-between”
― Jessie Gaynor, The Glow

“She knew that in order to be a participant in capitalism rather than solely a victim of it, she had to have something to sell, but she didn’t believe in her own viability as a product and had no ideas for better ones. As an account manager at Relevancy PR, she shilled goods she knew to be third-rate, and her lack of conviction fed her stasis.”
― Jessie Gaynor, The Glow

“Jane Dorner had never used a butt plug, and manicures made her cuticles bleed.”
― Jessie Gaynor, The Glow

“the Scary Women had fully realized ambition. She envied them so much she had actually convinced herself that she didn’t want to be one of them, because they never seemed to have any fun. Which was true, except Jane never really had any fun, either. The Scary Women had long- and medium- and short-term goals. They were trying to eat more but they just kept forgetting to eat! Their trainers were going to kill them, but nothing else would kill them. All their hobbies were passions, and all their passions became start-ups successful enough to earn back the seed money from their father-husbands within a year. The Scary Women were the subjects of profiles that remarked on their surprising sweetness. But they were not sweet. They were ruthlessly effective. They were the way forward.”
― Jessie Gaynor, The Glow

“That maybe she was, in some small way, helping make the system more equitable for everyone. Just because trickle-down economics was a lie didn’t mean trickle-down health had to be.”
― Jessie Gaynor, The Glow

“Jane didn’t want to sell Cass to hopeless cancer patients—she wanted to sell her to dull-skinned thirty-somethings with too much disposable income. People who deserved to be relieved of their excess money.”
― Jessie Gaynor, The Glow

“He hated it, and hated himself, but he was hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt from law school and his mother had early-onset Alzheimer’s. Only the really evil jobs paid well enough to get him out from under his circumstances.”
― Jessie Gaynor, The Glow

“If I can figure out how to describe whatever this is in a press release, I’m going to be so fucking rich, she thought.”
― Jessie Gaynor, The Glow

“was the most dangerous kind of person: the kind who believed her own bullshit. They could convince you. Jane had always wanted to belong to something, but now, in Cass’s orbit, she wondered if slipping into belief might be this easy.”
― Jessie Gaynor, The Glow

“Jane could already see the Cherish Hydration merch: mint-green water bottles with wooden caps, rose-quartz tote bags, possibly yoga-friendly T-shirts if she could find the right font. Cooking with Water: Recipes to Help You Cherish Hydration and Breathe Abundantly.”
― Jessie Gaynor, The Glow

“As much as she hated Farren, she knew that what FortPath needed was dozens more Farrens, women who hated specific things about their appearance mostly out of habit, but who had internalized the idea of themselves as Badass Boss Babes enough to feel some shame about that hatred. Scary Women.”
― Jessie Gaynor, The Glow

“The confidence required to claim that more than half of diseases were drug company inventions was unfathomable to Jane. She wondered if Cass actually believed it. Somehow, she hoped so.”
― Jessie Gaynor, The Glow

“She wouldn’t steal your boyfriend, but she might fuck his brother and tell you about that dick. She did barre and boot camp, but she was just in it to cancel out the day-drinking.”
― Jessie Gaynor, The Glow

“Everyone agreed that he was brilliant, but he wore his intelligence like his perfect jean jacket- I stole it from my mom, he'd confessed on their first date- an effortless afterthought.”
― Jessie Gaynor, The Glow