How to Care for a Human Girl Quotes

“She couldn’t with the circle of life right now. She was done with the circle. She wanted life linear, a clean line stretching into infinity.”
― Ashley Wurzbacher, How to Care for a Human Girl

“Maddy is angry with her younger self for not fully appreciating moments like these when she was alive inside them, though she does not know what it would mean to do so. What could she have done inside those scenes but let them unreel at the same old pace? A minute is a minute whether you think about it or not; an hour is an hour. She could not have prolonged those turquoise afternoons with her mother, nor purified them, if she’d had the foresight of loss to realize what they’d one day come to mean to her. Probably, if she had had such foresight, it would only have spoiled the moment, injecting her innocence with preemptive grief.”
― Ashley Wurzbacher, How to Care for a Human Girl

“Her mother was now the stuff of story, and everyone wants their story to have a strong protagonist, a peppy female lead who takes no bullshit. But some people are tired and some people are sick and some people do take bullshit, and those people need stories, too; those people deserve to be remembered, too.”
― Ashley Wurzbacher, How to Care for a Human Girl

“everyone wants their story to have a strong protagonist, a peppy female lead who takes no bullshit. But some people are tired and some people are sick and some people do take bullshit, and those people need stories, too; those people deserve to be remembered, too.”
― Ashley Wurzbacher, How to Care for a Human Girl

“Being able to choose was not just about objectively having options; it was also about psychologically perceiving them. Morality constrained those perceptions. It took options off the table.”
― Ashley Wurzbacher, How to Care for a Human Girl

“nor purified them, if she’d had the foresight of loss to realize what they’d one day come to mean to her. Probably, if she had had such foresight, it would only have spoiled the moment, injecting her innocence with preemptive grief.”
― Ashley Wurzbacher, How to Care for a Human Girl

“What she’d tell him, if she thought he’d listen, was born not only of her experience but of her research: dispense with the notion that humans are rational choosers. Dispense with the idea that we will inevitably, out of practicality and self-awareness, reject what will hurt us and embrace what won’t, reject what doesn’t make sense and embrace what does. Dispense with these things and the sad, strange world will, paradoxically, make a little more sense.”
― Ashley Wurzbacher, How to Care for a Human Girl

“She was a tiny atom, she was a sprawling galaxy. She was made of stars. She was nothing, she was everything; her pregnancy trivial, planetary. She wanted everything to be just one thing. But which one was the right one? How did you know?”
― Ashley Wurzbacher, How to Care for a Human Girl

“Marriage was mostly pajamas.”
― Ashley Wurzbacher, How to Care for a Human Girl

“She thought again of that chain of paper dolls she'd pictured earlier, all her hand-to-hand selves sometimes folded and collapsed in a pile, sometimes stretched in an endless line. Maybe, she thought, you are more than parts of a single whole--tits, womb, wounded hand, pink hair. Maybe you are a multitude: a pregnant woman on a bridge screaming into the darkness, a child on a bridge screaming into her sister's lap. You are all these things at once, not shedding your skins but wearing them in layers. You are all the people you've ever been, always.”
― Ashley Wurzbacher, How to Care for a Human Girl

“Did anyone ever really feel just one thing at a time, at this or any other pivotal moment of their life? How long did you have to feel something before it became The Way You Felt and not just a mood, a phase, and was there a difference between making a choice and making your best guess?”
― Ashley Wurzbacher, How to Care for a Human Girl

“She did not believe in God, but sometimes she did indulge in a vision of a great, cloud-dwelling scientist arranging the accessories of her life before her and then observing as she scrabbled through them, a rat in an experiment. A rat, yes, but one that acted in basic accordance with most other rats.”
― Ashley Wurzbacher, How to Care for a Human Girl

“The fact was she liked her body, or at least she liked beholding it from the outside the way someone else would. She liked knowing how others saw her. There was power in this knowledge, or at least there could be if she could figure out how to use it, how to reconcile the body she admired with the body she inhabited. She liked the idea that, should she become separated from her body, she could pick it out of a lineup: that one, her, that's mine.”
― Ashley Wurzbacher, How to Care for a Human Girl

“Where Maddy now cares for injured owls, Jada had cared for a human girl-- a human girl who, all signs indicate, is as unconscious or forgetful of that steadfast daily care as a bird would be.”
― Ashley Wurzbacher, How to Care for a Human Girl

“Jada had held signs bearing the slogan before, marched in the streets after the election with her poster board and bubble letters, but the words felt newly charged, and she realized that until now the "my" in MY BODY, MY CHOICE had seemed not truly to apply to her but only to other women. She felt guilty, contrite, now that she had come to see her belief in her own exceptionalism for what it was. She had thought she could be smart enough, careful enough, impermeable enough not to need the rights she marched for. Everything had still been hypothetical then.”
― Ashley Wurzbacher, How to Care for a Human Girl