Three Women Quotes
"One inheritance of living under the male gaze for centuries is that heterosexual women often look at other women the way a man would."
"In these ways and more, it was the female parts of an interlude that, in my eyes, came to stand for the whole of what longing in America looks like."
"The way the wind blows in our country can make us question who we are in our own lives."
"It’s relatability that moves us to empathize."
"Throughout history, men have broken women’s hearts in a particular way."
"Some women wait because if they don’t, there’s a threat of evanescence."
"We pretend to want things we don’t want so nobody can see us not getting what we need."
"It’s the nuances of desire that hold the truth of who we are at our rawest moments."
"I set out to register the heat and sting of female want so that men and other women might more easily comprehend before they condemn."
"Sometimes the one who doesn’t can feel that the other woman is a betrayer. She might worry that the other woman wants more, not just the penis, not something a dildo can’t sate, but the idea of a man, the idea of someone who is larger, the idea of being ecstatically subjugated by masculine energy."
"Hawaii makes her aware of her contradictions. She spends whole warm nights examining herself. She takes long walks on the beach. She watches her toes burrow into the sand and thinks about everybody back home who will be surprised at who she has become when she returns."
"But sometimes she falls on the sword of her own desire. And lies there, and repents too late, and too incorrectly, for anyone to want to save her."
"It is a terrible thing when you feel grateful that someone who is supposed to defend you finally begins to defend you."
"She felt more comfortable on her feet. So she had always returned to the buzzing floors, the clinking glasses."
"It’s impossible to answer. You couldn’t be honest about exactly how something like that is worded. Utter honesty, Sloane knew, had no place in threesomes—in any kind of sex, for that matter."
"Most exhilaratingly, they did not apologize for themselves. Even Holly Golightly, with her dizzy wavering, always seemed to make a deal with herself in the morning, in her tiny bathroom, that it would be her against the world."
"He was confident and strong and powerful. He was never jealous or mean. He was talented and self-assured and gave orders to his staff in a manner both kind and resolute."
"The way Maggie sees it, she wants it more than he does. He doesn’t know she’s a virgin. He doesn’t know that just a few months ago she’d been giving her sister a hard time for being pregnant and unwed."
"For Sloane there had always been something mature about not drawing a severe line between genders and marking your predilections on either side."
"Everybody in the world judged you except this man."
"Your friends looked at you as though you were going to suck their crushes off."
"The question, Hoy says, was did you confide in him about it? Yes, you say."
"It’s the particular blend of beauty and ease that, years later, after strife and death hit, will make her think strife and death don’t make it out to Colorado."
"She can’t talk to her parents about it, nor does she want to. Her parents—their very existence—make her feel like a slut."
"She begins to handwrite a letter. She likes to write longhand. She can think better that way."
"The hurt doesn’t disappear, but it changes. It turns the manageable color of a bruise."
"How can you call yourself a husband, she says, and not give your wife the one thing that is supposed to unite you above all else?"
"It’s the high-five moments from other people that break down the relationship."
"The house feels like a set of posts without a goal."
"She feels life slipping. She felt that her body was being wasted, that her heart was resting like a steak on a cutting board."
"You lose twenty pounds, you get ten compliments a week, that’s nine more than your partner has given you in a month."
"She feels no pain. She takes medication for her fibromyalgia but nothing helps and when the anxiety creeps in about her life slipping away she can actually feel the pain in her bones."
"They think Lina’s pain isn’t physical. They say it’s all in her head."
"Being in love with someone means being okay with all of him."
"Women shouldn't judge one another's lives, if we haven't been through one another's fires."
"She has lived an entire lifetime between her first kiss with Aidan and this kiss with Aidan."
"Lina, he says, this may not be the most clinical thing I can say, but I’ve had many a fibro patient cured with a good orgasm."
"The way he French-kisses me, she will tell the discussion group later, it’s like he’s inside my body and flipping a big ole switch and I just turn on, all of me lights up."
"He’s bigger, with a considerable gut where once there was a six-pack, but she thinks he is as gorgeous as ever."
"For the rest of the night they would repeat the sentiment a great number of times while intensely gazing into each other’s eyes."
"In the hotel room this night, she feels ecstatically pain-free."
"The way he looks at her is absolutely perfect."
"Holy shit, she thinks, did he make it a movie day so that he could look at me and we could share these thoughts in the dark?"
"The roads of Fargo are flung ahead like foreign airstrips."
"But that’s all that happens. He only looks, and then the car is moving again."
"Aaron uses the towel she brought from the bathroom and wipes his semen off her stomach and stands up."
"Sometimes even a child has to take liberties."
"All that remains is the final and lingering frost."
"She didn’t immediately hug her daughter. She asks about the drive or the flight and comments on the weather."
"She knew he couldn’t look at her, she who had killed his wife."
"Her kitchen always smelled of baked pies or sumptuous roasted birds."
"It’s the first time she understands the idea of making love to someone with your mouth."
"The overarching feeling she experiences is that she is slowly and quietly dying."
"If I see him on a Sunday I am in heaven and on Monday I am still feeling pretty good. But by Wednesday it hurts."
"You have to find a thousand different ways a day."
"She feels every morning and night for three months that he hasn’t made love to her."
"She wasn’t going to be every woman who has children and then cares for them and the house and has hobbies like pottery but nothing that feeds her otherwise."
"She passes the rest of her senior year like a kidney stone."
"Sometimes he looks pained, the hero staying in a shitty marriage because he loves his kids too much."
"She tells him she doesn’t want to go, doesn’t want to see him any more than she needs to, and he nods. He seems happy that she won’t come."
"There are things he does to her that he doesn’t do on purpose, which are worse because they mean the universe is spinning as though she doesn’t exist."
"She spends more money than she felt comfortable spending on a houndstooth dress but it fits fantastically. It’s a size eight."
"Everything he had told her was a lie. He had no pain. He only did what he wanted in the moment he wanted it."
"She plans to call the cops just before she does it so they will find her before her parents do."
"Nobody knows but Sammy. Sammy doesn’t know about this plan, but she knows her friend is underwater."
"It’s both worse and less painful than she expected."
"You can’t start freaking out and please God don’t ask me a million questions because I don’t know if I’m ready to answer them yet."
"Men know what other men think and want and do."
"Somehow this calls closer attention to all the bits and bobs of knobby sex parts, flicking and pinging like a pinball machine."
"She says she’s telling them because she’s ready to report it."
"She hates herself. She feels she will never be able to build up from here."
"I’m here, she says to the receptionist, to report the corruption of a minor."
"Efficiency became the backbone of his character."
"The dissipation of dignity can drive even the strongest men mad."
"There should be a stronger word than regret."
"But mostly Arlene remembered how he asked her, a few days earlier, to lie with him."
"He looked out for the kids he thought had problems, and I was one of those kids."
"She was doing something exclusively for herself when it came to sex."
"It was his predilection she was serving, though she enjoyed it as well."
"The feeling was amplified by the fact that this was happening in a restaurant."
"But Sloane could no longer pretend innocence."
"The rumors, as usual, didn’t take into account the complexity, much less the truth."
"The notion of father and brother felt scripted."
"All women turn into animals, at a certain point, Sloane knew, when they most need to."
"The sound of metal is always more disgusting than you imagine it to be."
"You say the worm has turned when someone who has previously accepted tremendous abuse suddenly decides that enough is enough and seeks revenge."
"Sloane always wanted to cut to the heart of the matter, perhaps because she came from a family that thought doing the opposite was in everyone’s best interest."
"The world sees Aaron Knodel as people are primed to see him, or, perhaps more chillingly, what people see is based on what someone they respect has told them to see."
"It’s the only way people would then agree to help."
"Sometimes doing the wrong thing just feels way too right."
"Remember how bad your hands were shaking? It makes me feel good to know you are so excited!"
"From the first night I dreamed of you, I knew I was hooked on you!"
"You get me to reveal the best and worst of me... and you still love me!"
"‘17’—you seem older! How many days are left?"
"I know I should not, but I want to see your face again, kiss you again, feel how it feels to move with you again."
"I love it when things work out like that! It’s a beautiful day here in Mooresville!"
"I will just be your friend since that’s what you want. Gonna be hard for me though since I will probably always have feelings for you. Will that be okay with ya?"
"Don’t let them see you happy, she whispered."
"If they see you are happy, they will try to destroy you."
"During the trial and thereafter, Maggie and her family were turned into a cliché."