Why Did You Stay? Quotes

“please, I know I’m waffling on but it’s so tiring, defending my opinions. Everything I’ve had to say for such a long time has been contested or counteracted or just shut down so please, please just let me!”
― Rebecca Humphries, Why Did You Stay?: A memoir about self-worth

“I love me, and I won’t let anything happen to her. All because once upon a time, my worst nightmare came true.”
― Rebecca Humphries, Why Did You Stay?: A memoir about self-worth

“You know what the excellent thing is, for us good guys?’ he asks. ‘How all these meatheads are too afraid of being emasculated to realise that strong, smart women are the sexiest ones.’ My new knickers are on fire.”
― Rebecca Humphries, Why Did You Stay?: A memoir about self-worth

“I think that sometimes the patriarchy can be a cunning decoy for bad guys. To take away from individual responsibility. “It wasn’t me, it was my patriarchal oppression”,”
― Rebecca Humphries, Why Did You Stay?: A memoir about self-worth

“I read this thing by Dorothy Dinnerstein, that says apparently when a little boy learns that their mother, who is the most powerful person in his life, really has no power within a patriarchy, he gets confused and it causes rage. And there’s nothing anyone can do about that, so long as the patriarchy exists. So yeah, that’s where that instinct for dominance over women can come from.”
― Rebecca Humphries, Why Did You Stay?: A memoir about self-worth

“Fuck what other people think about you, that’s none of your business.”
― Rebecca Humphries, Why Did You Stay?: A memoir about self-worth

“Stars in Their Eyes”
― Rebecca Humphries, Why Did You Stay?: A memoir about self-worth

“Here’s something. Have you ever thought you might be an addict?’ I choke. ‘Sorry?’ ‘I mean a codependent.’ ‘That’s not addiction, that’s tragic.’ ‘Wrong, it’s an addiction. It’s people who use the idea of love as a kind of substance, they have a proper group for it, Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous. I think it might apply to you.”
― Rebecca Humphries, Why Did You Stay?: A memoir about self-worth

“Michael Douglas was a sex addict, you know.’ ‘Michael Douglas said eating Catherine Zeta-Jones’ pussy gave him throat cancer.”
― Rebecca Humphries, Why Did You Stay?: A memoir about self-worth

“Time is sexist. There, I said it. Time discriminates against women. Those five and a half years mean something different to me than they do to Him. That relationship has ripped a chunk of fertility out of my timeline, for ever. And not His.”
― Rebecca Humphries, Why Did You Stay?: A memoir about self-worth

“And most of all I’m furious at how devoted I am to it, and how much I don’t want to leave it. Because the more my eyes begin to open about harmful relationships, the more I see them everywhere, and the clearer it becomes that the longest running toxic love of my life has actually been my career.”
― Rebecca Humphries, Why Did You Stay?: A memoir about self-worth

“If the damage isn’t permanent it’s not considered criminal.”
― Rebecca Humphries, Why Did You Stay?: A memoir about self-worth

“Pieter Bruegel’s painting Dull Gret.”
― Rebecca Humphries, Why Did You Stay?: A memoir about self-worth

“I’d tried to have sex a few times and had been called a nymphomaniac. That’s when I changed my birth control as I thought the hormones were making me sex crazed and emotional.”
― Rebecca Humphries, Why Did You Stay?: A memoir about self-worth

“If you carried your heart on the outside of your body, would you be more careful who you let hold it?”
― Rebecca Humphries, Why Did You Stay?: A memoir about self-worth

“The other day Mum was in the bathroom for an hour so I asked what was wrong with her; she said she was fine. Just like I am: fine.”
― Rebecca Humphries, Why Did You Stay?: A memoir about self-worth

“Those people are damaged. They’re looking for help, but they can’t accept it, not really. At their core they don’t value themselves enough. It’s sad, really. Not excusable but. Not always intentional. Sad.”
― Rebecca Humphries, Why Did You Stay?: A memoir about self-worth

“Eliminated the risk of being that kind of woman, a ‘woman spurned’. Even though I am one. But I was tactical. If I spoke with an edge, only the edge would be heard.”
― Rebecca Humphries, Why Did You Stay?: A memoir about self-worth

“Sometimes I am so mad that my madness feels like clarity.”
― Rebecca Humphries, Why Did You Stay?: A memoir about self-worth

“A fish log for a fuck.”
― Rebecca Humphries, Why Did You Stay?: A memoir about self-worth

“Would someone say about me: Where oh where did that woman go?”
― Rebecca Humphries, Why Did You Stay?: A memoir about self-worth

“Some relationships are the slow, dark dance of death.”
― Rebecca Humphries, Why Did You Stay?: A memoir about self-worth

“Because what defines you in life isn’t what happens to you, but how you deal with it.”
― Rebecca Humphries, Why Did You Stay?: A Memoir About Self-Worth

“I walk into the bathroom, to see the floor I once sobbed on until I couldn’t breathe when he hadn’t come home one evening and I thought about him no longer being in my life.”
― Rebecca Humphries, Why Did You Stay?: A memoir about self-worth

“That wouldn’t have been something I’d have thought before any of this happened. Has this relationship ruined me?’ ‘No, we won’t let it.’ ‘I’m making everything about me,’ I say. I start to shake, my hands start flailing. ‘I feel like such a narcissist.”
― Rebecca Humphries, Why Did You Stay?: A memoir about self-worth

“You’re doing that weird tick thing.’ I hold”
― Rebecca Humphries, Why Did You Stay?: A memoir about self-worth

“...around the women who appear on the show I often feel like the only manatee at Mermaid Lagoon. That's in physical terms, of course. Personality wise I am much smaller, more like a mouse looking through its hiding place at all the bendy, confident cats licking their own genitals.”
― Rebecca Humphries, Why Did You Stay?: A Memoir About Self-Worth