Bad Mormon: A Memoir Quotes
"What good is a queen if she’s not striving to expand her kingdom?"
I may have had "BIC" on my church membership record, but growing up, I didn’t know what 'covenant' meant. I just thought that we were better than everyone else.
"I wanted to share the gospel! I wanted to help the world! I was blessed to be born into the covenant, born into the faith, and I knew I had a duty to share it with those who were less fortunate."
"If you are born to parents married outside of the temple, you aren’t a BIC. You can still be admitted into the highest level of heaven, but it requires a work-around."
"The world was mine for the taking, and there was nothing I couldn’t do if I set my mind to it."
"On the other side of the gate, it was all so clear. I was locked out of my life, locked away from my family, abandoned in the lone and dreary world."
"I wanted to be perfect. I wanted to be pure. I wanted the fairy tale."
"My ambition had exceeded my ability, and I understood why my parents had built the fence and been explicit about the rules."
"Everything in my life confirmed my identity, my faith, and my future. Until it didn’t."
"My father tried to laugh off the fact that he couldn’t break me. No face, no case. He wasn’t upset, just deeply, deeply concerned about my refusal to cop to the crime."
"Make some earrings I can sell for around six dollars, and we will see how they do."
"I cast my line, and the fish were biting."
"I won BYU’s Entrepreneur Student of the Year Honorable Mention my junior year."
"Being a businesswoman was not a mark of success in my family nor my community."
"Any tremor of feminism created a tidal-wave reaction within the administration."
"You flashed your tits and someone told? You were going home in a body bag of shame and debt."
"I knew distinctly the times when I had heard the Spirit whisper to me and I chose to ignore it."
"Promptings are important. You need to learn to listen to them in life."
"Our white-bread wonderland was a marshmallow world that I would no longer take for granted."
"Electric Beach was a safe space for everyone."
"I wanted to eat food men had ordered for me and face trees that were too beautiful to cut down."
"Sweet dreams are made of this. Who am I to disagree?"
"There would be no harvesting of this Heather."
"I was wallowing in my pain and coping the best way I knew how."
"I was treading an unmarked path on my Plan of Happiness."
"The map only led to marriage, so I didn’t know where to go next."
"God knew me. He knew that I would struggle if it was somewhere lame, and he gave me the Côte d’Azur."
"I was grateful that I had never done anything to take me away from the church."
"Before leaving for the MTC, every missionary must go through the temple to be washed, anointed, and endowed."
"The temple clothing is symbolic and sacred and not to be discussed outside of the temple."
"God lives in the celestial kingdom. It is like the glory of the sun."
"The temple worker removed a retractable metal pointer from his breast pocket."
"I wanted to understand why we wore garments, why we needed green aprons."
"You believe. You fall in line. You commit."
"My mission was not only about the work we were doing, but also about the people we were doing the work with."
"Single motherhood was something to be feared."
"I was always going to be me: the girl who loved Drambuie."
"I became a mastermind of the trade, sorting through compromised blister packs at a blistering pace."
"The Standard of Truth has been erected; no unhallowed hand can stop the work from progressing; persecutions may rage, mobs may combine, armies may assemble, calumny may defame, but the truth of God will go forth boldly, nobly, and independent, till it has penetrated every continent, visited every clime, swept every country, and sounded in every ear, till the purposes of God shall be accomplished, and the Great Jehovah shall say the work is done."
"Dear Heavenly Father, please bless sweet Yacine. Bless him with hope, and faith, and spatial awareness. Please bless him to keep the tip of his dangling penis from grazing the top of my thigh."
"And it came to pass that he said unto them: Behold, here are the waters of Mormon (for thus were they called) and now, as ye are desirous to come into the fold of God, and to be called his people, and are willing to bear one another’s burdens, that they may be light; Yea, and are willing to mourn with those that mourn; yea, and comfort those that stand in need of comfort, and to stand as witnesses of God at all times and in all things, and in all places that ye may be in, even until death, that ye may be redeemed of God, and be numbered with those of the first resurrection, that ye may have eternal life—Now I say unto you, if this be the desire of your hearts, what have you against being baptized in the name of the Lord, as a witness before him that ye have entered into a covenant with him, that ye will serve him and keep his commandments, that he may pour out his Spirit more abundantly upon you?"
"God gave us families to help us become what he wants us to be, but all I was becoming was a ghost of my former self."
"How am I going to do this? The hill I’m walking up is getting good and steep."
"The capacity to shut off an entire part of yourself is a terrifying thing. Even more thrilling and terrifying is the capacity to do it well."
"You don’t have to help me. You don’t have to care. You just have to be there."
"Join the club and figure it out. It’s too late now. You can’t get a divorce. This is just how it is."
"No matter the events of that evening, his family was always going to have his back."
"Despite everything, I still believed Billy Gay would come home to his family and stay true to his covenants."
"There was no escaping the truth that our marriage was over."
"I tried to be honest with them. In my position, I felt safe enough to unfold my secret, but I still couldn’t say the word divorce."
"I had the benefit of my whiteness, cisness, straightness. I had the benefit of financial stability."
"I felt vulnerable imposing on his family, but I was desperate."
"For the first time in my life, I felt wanted for my flaws, not just my facade."
"When you dream of something for so long, it can at times imprison you."
"I wasn’t coming out like every other person who left the faith. No, I was coming out on television."
"I had been raised to be a lowercase-h housewife my entire life."
"So much of my life had already been wasted on useless endeavors."
"Even if I didn’t call myself a Mormon and even if I wanted to be free from it, I still didn’t want to hurt anyone."
"It was the external validation from the fans that let me know that what I was doing had meaning."
"I sat them all down on camera and told them that I wanted to leave. Not only was I coming out to my daughters, but I was also coming out to myself."