Bellies Quotes

“But I’ve been thinking about how the trunks of trees bend and curve when they grow next to each other. Their leaves twist to accommodate each other. Their closeness reads on the shape of them, and you can infer the shape of one from the shape of another. When you know someone and you grow together, your shape and form become theirs. And so even though Rob is gone, and there’ll never be another Rob, another friend I’ve known as well or as closely, the impression his life left on me will always be there, and in that sense we haven’t lost him at all.”
― Nicola Dinan, Bellies

“Maybe that's what people are supposed to do, sponge out the bad, wring out the suffering as much as we can, even if it stains our hearts and hands.”
― Nicola Dinan, Bellies

“You can take charge of your own life without it being an admission of guilt or fault.”
― Nicola Dinan, Bellies

“I'd spent years feeling happy to be nourished by Ming's light, so much so that I'd never asked what I could be for myself, only what I could be for her. I'd long suspected that Ming shone brighter than me, the same way I'd suspected Sarah did, too.”
― Nicola Dinan, Bellies

“You’re smiling,” he says.
I am confused for a moment, and then I understand.
“I’m smiling. You’re smiling.”
“I’m smiling.”
― Nicola Dinan, Bellies

“When the train arrives, I climb on and sit opposite a girl who smiles at me. She’s wearing loose trousers and a stripy top with a cardigan. She has her hair in a bun on top of her head. She looks like an ally. The kind that doesn’t know any queer people but makes her boyfriend watch Drag Race. I wonder what’s going on in her head when she looks at me. Probably nonsense. Slay coochie mama queen yes god tongue pop!”
― Nicola Dinan, Bellies

“The panels of his corset split with the tectonic slowness of continents, his back the mantle from which the world would open.”
― Nicola Dinan, Bellies

“I have a bad habit of going along with things that aren't right for me, and I'm just trying to do the things a person would do if they loved themselves as much as they loved other people, I guess.”
― Nicola Dinan, Bellies

“I think about what Janice said about fighting upward. Am I fighting upward? Transitioning feels like submitting to the forces I long resisted. Letting the flood take me. Sometimes, though, it feels like the opposite. Like I’m suspended by hooks rather than in water. My body on display for doctors and surgeons and for people with opinions not worth sharing but that they share anyway. We should think about how to optimize your breast growth. Have you considered getting a brow lift, too? Is she, like, going to go all the way? Is that a girl? Do you think she’s got a dick? It’s a new uphill fight.”
― Nicola Dinan, Bellies

“Maybe that’s what people are supposed to do, sponge out the bad, wring out the suffering as much as we can, even if it stains our hearts and hands.”
― Nicola Dinan, Bellies

“She suggests Saving Face, but I let her know it’s already a movie.”
― Nicola Dinan, Bellies

“I feel like I’ve been drawing an outline of myself using negative space,”
― Nicola Dinan, Bellies

“The most he did out of the house was shovel food onto my plate, affection buried in soup and grain.”
― Nicola Dinan, Bellies

“If Gwyneth Paltrow told her to lick the bottom of a dirty flip-flop, she’d lick the bottom of ten.”
― Nicola Dinan, Bellies

“My ribs tessellated with the gaps between his, and my hands hooked onto the webs between his fingers.”
― Nicola Dinan, Bellies