Shrill: Notes From A Loud Woman Quotes
"Why is, 'What do you want to be when you grow up?' the go-to small talk we make with children?"
"I’ve always been a great big person... I was too big, from birth. Abnormally big. Medical-anomaly big. Unchartably big."
"Your body is not yours. Your body is your enemy. Your body is gross. Your body is wrong. Your body is broken. Your body isn’t what men like. Your body is less important than a fetus."
"My abortion was a normal medical procedure that got tangled up in my bad relationship, my internalized fatphobia, my fear of adulthood, my discomfort with talking about sex."
"The truth is that life is unfathomably complex, and every abortion story is as unique as the person who lives it."
"What if you could opt out of the game altogether? I paused and considered. When the nutrition teacher e-mailed, I didn’t sign up for the next session of Almond Gulag."
"I hate being fat. I hate the way people look at me, or don’t. I hate being a joke... I also love being fat. The breadth of my shoulders makes me feel safe. I am unassailable. I intimidate."
"It was so easy for an explanation to sound like a justification. The truth is that I don’t give a damn why anyone has an abortion. I believe unconditionally in the right of people with uteruses to decide what grows inside their body and feeds on their blood and endangers their life and reroutes their future."
"I walked around the corner, bought the thing, took it home to my studio apartment, and peed on it. I probably bought some candy and toilet paper too as, like, a decoy."
"I am profoundly grateful to say that I have never felt inherently worthless. Any self-esteem issues I’ve had were externally applied—people told me I was ugly, revolting, shameful, unacceptably large"
"How hard would you breathe if you had to carry me? You couldn’t. But I can."
"Looking at pictures of fat people makes you like fat people more. (Eternal reminder: Representation matters.)"
"First, I stopped reacting with knee-jerk embarrassment at the brazenness of their bodies."
"Then, one day, they were beautiful. I wanted to spill out of a crop top; alienate small, bitter men who dared to presume that women exist for their consumption."
"My body was an opportunity. It moved the world just by existing. What a gift."
"We live and then we stop living. We exist and then we stop existing. That means I only get one chance to do a good job. I want to do a good job."
"No one teaches young men how to take care of fat girls."
"Fat people are an extremely suboptimal bogeyman."
"I never wanted to fight virtual trolls; I wanted to fight real ones. With a sword."
Being fat is like walking around with a sandwich board that says, "HERE’S WHERE TO HURT ME!" That’s why reclaiming fatness is so revolutionary.
"The only answer is to decide we’re worth helping."
"I never wanted Internet trolls to be my beat—I want to write feminist polemics, jokes about wizards, and love letters to John Goodman’s meaty, sexual forearms."
"I learned how to weather the mob without falling out of my skin, becoming my own tedious shadow."
"It’s just the Internet. There’s nothing we can do."
"I never wanted to make a living writing about being abused on the Internet."
"The goal is to traumatize me, erode my mental health, force me to quit my job."
"I am aware every day that other people find my body disgusting."
"I don’t have to justify its awesomeness/attractiveness/healthiness/usefulness to anyone, because it is MINE. Not yours."
"Fat people already are ashamed. It’s taken care of."
"I have wanted to change this body my whole life. I have never wanted anything as much as I have wanted a new body."
"My ability to weather online abuse is one of the great tragedies of my life."
"I was an avoider, an escaper, a fantasist. Even as an adult, all I ever wanted was to write jokes, puns, and Game of Thrones recaps."
"You can’t fix a problem by targeting its victims."
"The rich aren’t paying for luxury—they’re paying for basic humanity."
"My fixation on the fantastical is not difficult to trace."
"I don’t have anything remotely noteworthy to say about myself."
"I used the part in Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure when Bill’s trying to keep his stepmom from noticing that he and Keanu Reeves are forcing six kidnapped historical figures to do his chores."
"For years afterwards, thinking of that presentation made me a little sick."
"Comedy has always been a safe harbor for the ‘a bit much’es of the world."
"I never wanted to do stand-up, particularly, though I certainly nursed an idealized notion of how ‘fun’ it would be to hang out in comedy club greenrooms."
"I graduated in 2004 with an English degree and a case of impostor syndrome so intense that I convinced myself I didn’t have enough ideas to become a writer of any kind."
"Stigma works like this: Comic makes people with herpes the butt of his joke. Audience laughs. People with herpes see their worst fears affirmed."
"I wanted to be immersed in comedy—the creation of it and the consumption of it—all the time."
"The first day, it was just a few tweets here and there—regular 'Totally Biased' viewers, plus the small number of my fans and Jim’s who made it a point to tune in on cable."
"The tree fell on the house when I was sleeping, alone, in the bed that used to be ours, two weeks before my father died, four weeks after Aham told me he was leaving."
"Cancer doesn’t hand you an itinerary. It’s not like, up to a certain point, you have an okay amount of cancer, and then one day the doctor’s like, ‘Uh-oh! Too much cancer!’"
"He had begun grieving—for himself, for the life he wasn’t ready to leave behind."
"Knock ’em dead, kid," he said. And I did. It’s so fucking unfair that he didn’t get to see it.
"Sometimes a team of doctors would come in and loom over us with well-rehearsed but clinical concern. 'How are you doing?' they would ask."
"I have never wanted anything as much as I wanted that shitty purgatory to be over. Except for one thing—which was for that shitty purgatory to never be over. Because when it’s over, it’s over."
"One moment his body was the locus of his personhood, the next moment our memories had to pick up the slack."
"Grudgingly, I’d come to see Aham’s point a little bit. He fell in love with this person, and in my desperation to hang on to him, I morphed myself into something else entirely."
"I wasn’t surprised that this woman took so many willful leaps past 'couple' and landed on 'roommates' in her split-second sussing-out of our relationship—it happens all the time."
"Being fat and happy and in love is still a radical act."
"I returned to my regular routine of daily hate mail, scrolling through the same options over and over—Ignore? Block? Report? Engage?"
"We’re all building our world, right now, in real time. Let’s build it better."