Not That Kind Of Girl: A Young Woman Tells You What She's "Learned" Quotes
"When someone shows you how little you mean to them and you keep coming back for more, before you know it you start to mean less to yourself."
"What gets said to you gets said to all of you, ditto what gets done."
"Being treated like shit is not an amusing game or a transgressive intellectual experiment."
"When you're treated with indifference that bordered on disdain, it makes you feel silenced, lonely, and far from yourself."
"The truest feeling of joy I have ever known is the door opening to reveal my father there to rescue me from a bad play date."
"I have only touched one other computer, and found the experience disconcerting."
"I’m an unreliable narrator... I add an invented detail to almost every story I tell about my mother."
"Being a girl with low self-esteem, bringing back detailed intelligence reports on the dark side for girls with boyfriends."
"I felt like I was being chewed on by a child that wasn’t mine."
"I can’t keep rejiggering my identity, and hating computers is a part of my identity."
"The fact that they are so often free of the people-pleasing instincts I have considered to be a curse of my female existence."
"You have to be positive and just talk with your eyes."
"It’s hard to imagine that anything you do in a room full of lights, old Italian dudes, and bad tuna sandwiches is going to be seen on TV by multitudes."
"It’s a special kind of privilege to be born into the body you wanted, to embrace the essence of your gender even as you recognize what you are up against."
"I am forced to engage in regular conversation about my body with strangers."
"It’s not brave to do something that doesn’t scare you."
"The bigger existential questions don’t seem to plague her, and she can clean her stove without ever once thinking, What’s the point?"
"The vagina is potential. It’s not emptiness, it’s possibility."
"I may hate the term "girl crush," but a picture does not lie."
"It’s okay to change your mind." About a feeling, a person, a promise of love. I can’t stay just to avoid contradicting myself.
"When you’re my age, you’ll know how mysterious this all is," he says.
"I wish you were here," he said. "I’d take you for ice cream and show you the waves."
"You will find," she says, "that there’s a certain grace to having your heart broken."
"No," I replied. "But my mommy is pregnant with a baby."
"Guess what? You’re going to have a baby sister."
"If you don’t try so hard it’ll be better," my father said.
"I actually like doing it." "It" meant "oral sex."
"I came here to grow," I tell her. "And you don’t want that."
"Your mom isn’t easy, and neither are you," she says.
"You are her possession, but you are also a person."
"This is actually a chance to reach the next phase of your bond if you will let it be."
"Never has the sound of her voice, that calm but expectant hello, not put me at ease."
"I guess, when it comes to death, none of us really has the words."
"Beautiful self-delusion: Isn’t that what being young is all about?"
"Gram recounted her adventures with Plymouth Rock stoicism."
"This, I remember thinking, is the end. Nothing had ever ended before."
"So every time I think about death, it's a way to avoid what's right in front of me."