Her Body And Other Parties Quotes

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Coach: "All right, Patch. let's say you're at a party. the room is full of girls of all shapes and sizes. You see blondes, brunettes, redheads, a few girl with black hair. Some are talkive, while other appear shy. You've one girl who fits your profile - attractive, intelligent and vulnerable. Dow do you let her know you're interested?" Patch: "Single her out. Talk to her." Coach: "Good. Now for the big question - how do you know if she's game or if she wants you to move on?" Patch: "I study her. I figure out what she's thinking and feeling. She's not gonig to come right out and tell me, which is why i have to pay attention. Does she turn her body toward mine? Does she hold me eyes, then look away? Does she bite her lip and play with her hair, the way Nora is doing right now?
Becca Fitzpatrick (Hush, Hush (Hush, Hush, #1))
Many people live and die without ever confronting themselves in the darkness.
Carmen Maria Machado (Her Body and Other Parties)
I have heard all of the stories about girls like me, and I am unafraid to make more of them.
Carmen Maria Machado (Her Body and Other Parties)
He is not a bad man, and that, I realize suddenly, is the root of my hurt.
Carmen Maria Machado (Her Body and Other Parties: Stories)
Why do you want to hide it from me?' 'I'm not hiding it. It just isn't yours.
Carmen Maria Machado (Her Body and Other Parties: Stories)
Many people live and die without ever confronting themselves in the darkness. Pray that one day, you will spin around at the water’s edge, lean over, and be able to count yourself among the lucky.
Carmen Maria Machado (Her Body and Other Parties)
I understood that knowledge was a dwarfing, obliterating, all-consuming thing, and to have it was to both be grateful and to suffer greatly.
Carmen Maria Machado (Her Body and Other Parties: Stories)
As a grown woman, I would have said to my father that there are true things in this world observed only by a single set of eyes.
Carmen Maria Machado (Her Body and Other Parties: Stories)
Stories can sense happiness and snuff it out like a candle.
Carmen Maria Machado (Her Body and Other Parties: Stories)
It’s not that I hate men,” the woman says. “I’m just terrified of them. And I’m okay with that fear.
Carmen Maria Machado (Her Body and Other Parties)
(If you are reading this story out loud, force a listener to reveal a devastating secret, then open the nearest window to the street and scream it as loudly as you are able.)
Carmen Maria Machado (Her Body and Other Parties)
I once heard a story about a girl who requested something so vile from her paramour that he told her family and they had her hauled her off to a sanatorium. I don’t know what deviant pleasure she asked for, though I desperately wish I did. What magical thing could you want so badly they take you away from the known world for wanting it?
Carmen Maria Machado (Her Body and Other Parties)
You never live with a woman, you live inside of her, I overheard my father say to my brother once, and it was, indeed, as if, when peering into the mirror, you were blinking out through her thickly fringed eyes.
Carmen Maria Machado (Her Body and Other Parties)
I keep thinking I can see the virus blooming on the horizon like a sunrise. I realize the world will continue to turn, even with no people on it. Maybe it will go a little faster.
Carmen Maria Machado (Her Body and Other Parties: Stories)
I took a step toward her. "It is my right to reside in my own mind. It is my right," I said. "It is my right to be unsociable and it is my right to be unpleasant to be around. Do you ever listen to yourself? This is crazy, that is crazy, everything is crazy to you. By whose measure? Well, it is my right to be crazy, as you love to say so much. I have no shame. I have felt many things in my life, but shame is not among them." The volume of my voice caused me to stand on my tiptoes. I could not remember yelling like this, ever. "You may think that I have an obligation to you but I assure you that us being thrown together in this arbitrary arrangement does not cohesion make. I have never had less of an obligation to anyone in my life, you aggressively ordinary woman.
Carmen Maria Machado (Her Body and Other Parties: Stories)
Will I ever be done, transformed in the past tense, or will I always be transforming, better and better until I die?
Carmen Maria Machado (Her Body and Other Parties: Stories)
Not all of us can deal with the illumination that comes with justice.
Carmen Maria Machado (Her Body and Other Parties)
And isn't that how you become tender, vulnerable? The tissue-softening marination of your own mind, the quicksand of mental indulgence?
Carmen Maria Machado (Her Body and Other Parties: Stories)
I was a creature so small, trapped in some crevice of an indifferent universe.
Carmen Maria Machado (Her Body and Other Parties: Stories)
I believe in a world where impossible things happen. Where love can outstrip brutality, can neutralize it, as though it never was, or transform it into something new and more beautiful. Where love can outdo nature.
Carmen Maria Machado (Her Body and Other Parties)
If this child is part of The Plan, then The Plan was that I would be raped. If this child is not part of The Plan, then my rape was a violation of The Plan, in which case The Plan is not a Plan at all, but a Polite fucking Suggestion
Carmen Maria Machado (Her Body and Other Parties: Stories)
I took a step toward her. 'It is my right to reside in my own mind. It is my right,' I said.
Carmen Maria Machado (Her Body and Other Parties: Stories)
I do not even struggle to speak. The spark of words dies so deep in my chest, there is not even space to mount them on an exhale.
Carmen Maria Machado (Her Body and Other Parties: Stories)
They are talking about how we can't trust the faded women, women who can't be touched but can stand on the earth, which means they must be lying about something, they must be deceiving us somehow.
Carmen Maria Machado (Her Body and Other Parties: Stories)
And there was nothing in my eyes. Or even worse -- nothingness. Not the presence of a thing but the presence of a non-thing.
Carmen Maria Machado (Her Body and Other Parties: Stories)
I called her two days later, never having believed more firmly in love at first sight, in destiny. When she laughed on the other end of the line, something inside of me cracked open, and I let her step inside.
Carmen Maria Machado (Her Body and Other Parties: Stories)
I had no self-control, but tomorrow I would relinquish control and everything would be right again.
Carmen Maria Machado (Her Body and Other Parties: Stories)
A wife", he says, "should have no secrets from her husband." "I don't have any secrets," I tell him. "The ribbon." "The ribbon is not a secret; it's just mine.
Carmen Maria Machado (Her Body and Other Parties: Stories)
What if you colonize your own mind and when you get inside, the furniture is attached to the ceiling? What if you step inside and when you touch the furniture, you realize it's all just cardboard cutouts and it all collapses beneath the pressure of your finger? What if you get inside and there's no furniture? What if you get inside and it's just you in there, sitting in a chair, rolling figs and eggs around in the basked of your lap and humming a little tune? What if you get inside and there's nothing there, and then the door hatch closes and locks? What is worse: being locked outside of your own mind, or being locked inside of it?
Carmen Maria Machado (Her Body and Other Parties: Stories)
I want to say, Don't bother asking me anything. I want to say, There is nothing underneath.
Carmen Maria Machado (Her Body and Other Parties: Stories)
The moral of that story, I think, is that being poor will kill you.
Carmen Maria Machado (Her Body and Other Parties: Stories)
What is worse: being locked outside of your own mind, or being locked inside of if? What is worse: writing a Trope or being one? What about being more that one?
Carmen Maria Machado (Her Body and Other Parties: Stories)
When you think about it, stories have this way of running together like raindrops in a pond. Each is borne from the clouds separate, but once they have come together, there is no way to tell them apart.
Carmen Maria Machado (Her Body and Other Parties: Stories)
But without ego," Diego said, "your writing is just scribbles in a journal. Your art is just doodles. Ego demands that what you do is important enought that you be given money to work on it." He gestured to the hotel around us. "It demands that what you say is important enough that it be published or shown to the world.
Carmen Maria Machado (Her Body and Other Parties: Stories)
People can be monsters, or vulnerable as lambs. They—no, we—are perpetrators and victims at the same time. It takes so little to tip the scale one way or the other. This is the world we live in,
Carmen Maria Machado (Her Body and Other Parties)
BAD BLOOD": Stabler and Benson will never forget the case where solving the crime was so much worse than the crime itself.
Carmen Maria Machado (Her Body and Other Parties: Stories)
Autumn was the worst time to go into the mountains, I thought to myself. To drive into the wilderness when it writhed and gasped for air seemed foolish.
Carmen Maria Machado (Her Body and Other Parties: Stories)
My body radiates pain, is dense with it.
Carmen Maria Machado (Her Body and Other Parties)
The sixty-fifth story,” Henson whispers into her ear, “is about a world that watches you and me and everyone. Watches our suffering like it is a game. Can’t stop. Can’t tear themselves away. If they could stop, we could stop, but they won’t, so we can’t.
Carmen Maria Machado (Her Body and Other Parties)
(If you read this story out loud, please use the following voices: ME: as a child, high-pitched, forgettable; as a woman, the same. THE BOY WHO WILL GROW INTO A MAN, AND BE MY SPOUSE: robust with serendipity. MY FATHER: kind, booming; like your father, or the man you wish was your father. MY SON: as a small child, gentle, sounding with the faintest of lisps; as a man, like my husband. ALL OTHER WOMEN: interchangeable with my own.)
Carmen Maria Machado (Her Body and Other Parties: Stories)
None of us will make it to the end.
Carmen Maria Machado (Her Body and Other Parties: Stories)
As it turns out, being right was the third, and worst, mistake.
Carmen Maria Machado (Her Body and Other Parties)
... I could have scooped despair from the air by the handfuls.
Carmen Maria Machado (Her Body and Other Parties: Stories)
The lack of color is to show off the dresses. It terrifies our patrons into an existential crisis and then, a purchase. This is what Gizzy tells me, anyway. “The black,” she says, “reminds us that we are mortal and that youth is fleeting. Also, nothing makes pink taffeta pop like a dark void.
Carmen Maria Machado (Her Body and Other Parties)
Then the not-memory washed away like a wet painting in a storm, and I was in the shower, shaking, and she was outside, losing me, and there was no way for me to tell her not to.
Carmen Maria Machado (Her Body and Other Parties: Stories)
She’s like dough, how the give of it beneath kneading hands disguises its sturdiness, its potential.
Carmen Maria Machado (Her Body and Other Parties: Stories)
That night, I wash myself. The silky suds between my legs are the color and scent of rust, but I am newer than I have ever been.
Carmen Maria Machado (Her Body and Other Parties: Stories)
Afterward, everyone believed that she had wished to die, even though she had died proving that she wanted to live. As it turns out, being right was the third, and worst, mistake.
Carmen Maria Machado (Her Body and Other Parties)
Brides never fare well in stories. Stories can sense happiness and snuff it out like a candle.
Carmen Maria Machado (Her Body and Other Parties)
SELFISH”: The medical examiner can’t bring herself to admit that sometimes, she’s the one who wants to be cut open, to have someone tell her all of her own secrets.
Carmen Maria Machado (Her Body and Other Parties)
Everything is soft, like a fresh oil painting.
Carmen Maria Machado (Her Body and Other Parties: Stories)
I am always surprised at the poetry with which boys can describe boning.
Carmen Maria Machado (Her Body and Other Parties)
Sometimes I wonder if the bars make the monsters and not the other way around.
Carmen Maria Machado (Her Body and Other Parties: Stories)
A feeling settles over me—a one-beer-deep feeling, a no-more-skittering-feet-after-the-trap-snaps feeling.
Carmen Maria Machado (Her Body and Other Parties)
What is worse: being locked outside of your own mind, or being locked inside of it?
Carmen Maria Machado (Her Body and Other Parties: Stories)
I felt like she was seared into my time line, unchangeable as Pompeii.
Carmen Maria Machado (Her Body and Other Parties: Stories)
He wishes they were still floating safely in the unborn space, which he imagines to be grayish-blue, like the Atlantic, studded with star-like points of light, and thick as corn syrup.
Carmen Maria Machado (Her Body and Other Parties: Stories)
 "I choose this life," the prostitute says to the social worker with the worried eyes. "I do. Please put your energy into helping girls who aren't here by choice." She is so right. She is murdered anyway.
Carmen Maria Machado (Her Body and Other Parties: Stories)
When the baby cries, she could be hungry or thirsty or angry or cranky or sick or sleepy or paranoid or jealous or she had planned something but it went horribly awry. So you'll need to take care of that, when it happens.
Carmen Maria Machado (Her Body and Other Parties: Stories)
You may think that I have an obligation to you but I assure you that us being thrown together in this arbitrary arrangement does not cohesion make.
Carmen Maria Machado (Her Body and Other Parties)
Viktor Shklovsky’s idea of defamiliarization; of zooming in so close to something, and observing it so slowly, that it begins to warp, and change, and acquire new meaning.
Carmen Maria Machado (Her Body and Other Parties)
but I know that eldest girls sweeten their brothers and are protected by them from the dangers of the world—an arrangement that buoys my heart.
Carmen Maria Machado (Her Body and Other Parties)
Beyond the table, there is an altar, with candles lit for Billie Holiday and Willa Carter and Hypatia and Patsy Cline. Next to it, an old podium that once held a Bible, on which we have repurposed an old chemistry handbook as the Book of Lilith. In its pages is our own liturgical calendar: Saint Clementine and All Wayfarers; Saints Lorena Hickok and Eleanor Roosevelt, observed in the summer with blueberries to symbolize the sapphire ring; the Vigil of Saint Juliette, complete with mints and dark chocolate; Feast of the Poets, during which Mary Oliver is recited over beds of lettuce, Kay Ryan over a dish of vinegar and oil, Audre Lorde over cucumbers, Elizabeth Bishop over some carrots; The Exaltation of Patricia Highsmith, celebrated with escargots boiling in butter and garlic and cliffhangers recited by an autumn fire; the Ascension of Frida Khalo with self-portraits and costumes; the Presentation of Shirley Jackson, a winter holiday started at dawn and ended at dusk with a gambling game played with lost milk teeth and stones. Some of them with their own books; the major and minor arcana of our little religion.
Carmen Maria Machado (Her Body and Other Parties: Stories)
He is not a bad man, and that, I realize suddenly, is the root of my hurt. He is not a bad man at all. To describe him as evil or wicked or corrupted would do a deep disservice to him. And yet—
Carmen Maria Machado (Her Body and Other Parties)
When you think about it, stories have this way of running together like raindrops in a pond. Each is borne from the clouds separate, but once they have come together, there is no way to tell them apart.
Carmen Maria Machado (Her Body and Other Parties)
What I say: “Why did you leave her with me?” What I want to say: “This almost broke me, but it didn’t. It made me stronger than before. You have made me better. Thank you. I will love you until the end of time.
Carmen Maria Machado (Her Body and Other Parties: Stories)
I will look where her eyes would be. I will open my mouth to ask but then realize the question has answered itself: by loving me when I did not love her, by being abandoned by me, she has become immortal. She will outlive me by a hundred million years; more, even. She will outlive my daughter, and my daughter’s daughter, and the earth will teem with her and her kind, their inscrutable forms and unknowable destinies.
Carmen Maria Machado (Her Body and Other Parties: Stories)
It gives him delight in a way that houses no wanting, and this pleases me.
Carmen Maria Machado (Her Body and Other Parties: Stories)
god should have made girls lethal when he made monsters of men. —ELISABETH HEWER
Carmen Maria Machado (Her Body and Other Parties)
I lean into him and I want him. He is solid. He reminds me of a tree—roots that run deep.
Carmen Maria Machado (Her Body and Other Parties: Stories)
What magical thing could you want so badly they take you away from the known world for wanting it?
Carmen Maria Machado (Her Body and Other Parties)
Life is too short to be afraid of nothing,” she said, “and I will show you.” Pride is the second mistake.
Carmen Maria Machado (Her Body and Other Parties)
Without the interns to do their nefarious bidding, the gods turn to other tricks.
Carmen Maria Machado (Her Body and Other Parties: Stories)
I'm having a crisis of function.
Carmen Maria Machado (Her Body and Other Parties: Stories)
It were as if I were a minor character in someone else's play, and the plot required me to stay there at that moment, no matter how I resisted. Perhaps that is what caused my grief.
Carmen Maria Machado (Her Body and Other Parties: Stories)
Only then did I understand. Only then did I see the crystal outline of my past and future, conceive of what was above me (innumerable star, incalculable space) and what was below me (miles of mindless dirt and stone). I understood that knowledge was a dwarfing obliterating, all-consuming thing, and to have it was to both be grateful and suffer greatly. I was a creature so small, trapped in some crevice of an indifferent universe. But now, I knew.
Carmen Maria Machado (Her Body and Other Parties: Stories)
No limpid daughter slept in the backseat; no strange teenage girl sat next to me, stewing in her own nightmarish conciousness. (And isn't that how you become tender, vulnerable? The tissue-softening marination of your own mind, the quicksand of mental indulgence?)
Carmen Maria Machado (Her Body and Other Parties: Stories)
It is emerging, like the lie of snow withdrawing from the truth of the landscape.
Carmen Maria Machado (Her Body and Other Parties: Stories)
If there were any justice in the world, this oyster would grab hold of my tongue and choke me dead.
Carmen Maria Machado (Her Body and Other Parties: Stories)
And what is through the forest?
Carmen Maria Machado (Her Body and Other Parties: Stories)
The forgiveness tastes sweeter than any candy that can be given at any door. When he climbs into my lap, I sing to him until he falls asleep.
Carmen Maria Machado (Her Body and Other Parties)
I’ve wanted you since the first time I met you.” Benson leans forward and kisses her. The heartbeat is a hunger. She pulls her inside.
Carmen Maria Machado (Her Body and Other Parties)
I realize the world will continue to turn, even with no people on it. Maybe it will go a little faster.
Carmen Maria Machado (Her Body and Other Parties)
All these women. And Trina. Trina,” she repeated, with considerable passion as she gripped his shirt. “And gooey dessert and body things and chick-vids. All night. Slumber party. Do you know what that means?” “I’ve had many dreams of them. Will there be pillow fights?” She spun him around so his back hit the door. “Don’t. Leave. Me.” “Darling.” He kissed her brow. “I must. I must.” “No. You can bring Vegas here. Because . . . you’re you. You can do that. We’ll have Vegas here, and that’ll be good. I’ll buy you a lap dance.” “That’s so sweet. But I’m going. I’ll be back tomorrow, and lay a cool cloth on your fevered brow.” “Tomorrow?” She actually went light-headed. “You’re not coming back tonight?” “You wouldn’t be in this state now if you paid attention. I’m taking a shuttle full of men to Las Vegas late this afternoon. There will be ribaldry, and a possible need to post bond. I’ve made arrangements. I’ll bring back this same shuttle full of men—hopefully—tomorrow afternoon.” “Let me come with you.” “Let me see your penis.” “Oh, God! Can’t I just use yours?” “At any other time. Now pull yourself together, and remember that when all this is over, you’ll very likely arrest a killer who’s also a dirty cop. It’s like a twofer.” “That doesn’t make me feel better.” “Best I have.
J.D. Robb (Promises in Death (In Death, #28))
I feel so good,' they all said. Whenever I talked to them, that was what always came out of their mouths, or really, it was a mouth, a single mouth that once ate and now just says, 'I feel really, really good.
Carmen Maria Machado (Her Body and Other Parties: Stories)
In the bathroom, a mirror flecked with mascara from when Bad leans in close, the amoeba of her breath growing and shrinking. You never live with a woman, you live inside of her, I overheard my father say to my brother once, and it was, indeed, as if, when peering into the mirror, you were blinking out through her thickly fringed eyes.
Carmen Maria Machado (Her Body and Other Parties: Stories)
I dip my foot into the water. There is a second of brilliant heat that slides straight through me, like steel wire through a block of wet clay. I gasp but do not pause. A second foot, less pain. Hands on the sides of the bathtub, I lower myself down. The water hurts, and it is good. The chemicals in the bubble bath burn, and that is better.
Carmen Maria Machado (Her Body and Other Parties: Stories)
There is a story they tell, about a girl dared by her peers to venture to a local graveyard after dark. This was her folly: when they told her that standing on someone’s grave at night would cause the inhabitant to reach up and pull her under, she scoffed. Scoffing is the first mistake a woman can make. I will show you, she said. Pride is the second mistake. They gave her a knife to stick into the frosty earth, as a way of proving her presence and her theory. She went to that graveyard. Some storytellers say that she picked the grave at random. I believe she selected a very old one, her choice tinged by self-doubt and the latent belief that if she were wrong, the intact muscle and flesh of a newly dead corpse would be more dangerous than one centuries gone. She knelt on the grave and plunged the blade deep. As she stood to run she found she couldn’t escape. Something was clutching at her clothes. She cried out and fell down. When morning came, her friends arrived at the cemetery. They found her dead on the grave, the blade pinning the sturdy wool of her skirt to the ground. Dead of fright or exposure, would it matter when the parents arrived? She was not wrong, but it didn’t matter any more. Afterwards, everyone believed that she had wished to die, even though she had died proving that she could live. As it turns out, being right was the third, and worst, mistake.
Carmen Maria Machado (Her Body and Other Parties: Stories)
No one knows what causes it. It’s not passed in the air. It’s not sexually transmitted. It’s not a virus or a bacteria, or if it is, it’s nothing scientists have been able to find. At first everyone blamed the fashion industry, then the millennials, and, finally, the water. But the water’s been tested, the millennials aren’t the only ones going incorporeal, and it doesn’t do the fashion industry any good to have women fading away. You can’t put clothes on air. Not that they haven’t tried.
Carmen Maria Machado (Her Body and Other Parties: Stories)
It is my right to reside in my own mind. It is my right,' I said. 'It is my right to be unsociable and it is my right to be unpleasant to be around. Do you ever listen to yourself? This is crazy, that is crazy, everything is crazy to you. By whose measure? Well, it is my right to be crazy, as you love to say so much. I have no shame. I have felt many things in my life, but shame is not among them.
Carmen Maria Machado (Her Body and Other Parties: Stories)
Magnus, his silver mask pushed back into his hair, intercepted the New York vampires before they could fully depart. Alec heard Magnus pitch his voice low. Alec felt guilty for listening in, but he couldn’t just turn off his Shadowhunter instincts. “How are you, Raphael?” asked Magnus. “Annoyed,” said Raphael. “As usual.” “I’m familiar with the emotion,” said Magnus. “I experience it whenever we speak. What I meant was, I know that you and Ragnor were often in contact.” There was a beat, in which Magnus studied Raphael with an expression of concern, and Raphael regarded Magnus with obvious scorn. “Oh, you’re asking if I am prostrate with grief over the warlock that the Shadowhunters killed?” Alec opened his mouth to point out the evil Shadowhunter Sebastian Morgenstern had killed the warlock Ragnor Fell in the recent war, as he had killed Alec’s own brother. Then he remembered Raphael sitting alone and texting a number saved as RF, and never getting any texts back. Ragnor Fell. Alec felt a sudden and unexpected pang of sympathy for Raphael, recognizing his loneliness. He was at a party surrounded by hundreds of people, and there he sat texting a dead man over and over, knowing he’d never get a message back. There must have been very few people in Raphael’s life he’d ever counted as friends. “I do not like it,” said Raphael, “when Shadowhunters murder my colleagues, but it’s not as if that hasn’t happened before. It happens all the time. It’s their hobby. Thank you for asking. Of course one wishes to break down on a heart-shaped sofa and weep into one’s lace handkerchief, but I am somehow managing to hold it together. After all, I still have a warlock contact.” Magnus inclined his head with a slight smile. “Tessa Gray,” said Raphael. “Very dignified lady. Very well-read. I think you know her?” Magnus made a face at him. “It’s not being a sass-monkey that I object to. That I like. It’s the joyless attitude. One of the chief pleasures of life is mocking others, so occasionally show some glee about doing it. Have some joie de vivre.” “I’m undead,” said Raphael. “What about joie de unvivre?” Raphael eyed him coldly. Magnus gestured his own question aside, his rings and trails of leftover magic leaving a sweep of sparks in the night air, and sighed. “Tessa,” Magnus said with a long exhale. “She is a harbinger of ill news and I will be annoyed with her for dumping this problem in my lap for weeks. At least.” “What problem? Are you in trouble?” asked Raphael. “Nothing I can’t handle,” said Magnus. “Pity,” said Raphael. “I was planning to point and laugh. Well, time to go. I’d say good luck with your dead-body bad-news thing, but . . . I don’t care.” “Take care of yourself, Raphael,” said Magnus. Raphael waved a dismissive hand over his shoulder. “I always do.
Cassandra Clare (The Red Scrolls of Magic (The Eldest Curses, #1))
In the car inching its way down Fifth Avenue, toward Bergdorf Goodman and this glamorous party, I looked back on my past with a new understanding. This sickness, the “endo-whatever,” had stained so much—my sense of self, my womanhood, my marriage, my ability to be present. I had effectively missed one week of each month every year of my life since I was thirteen, because of the chronic pain and hormonal fluctuations I suffered during my period. I had lain in bed, with heating pads and hot-water bottles, using acupuncture, drinking teas, taking various pain medications and suffering the collateral effects of them. I thought of all the many tests I missed in various classes throughout my education, the school dances, the jobs I knew I couldn’t take as a model, because of the bleeding and bloating as well as the pain (especially the bathing suit and lingerie shoots, which paid the most). How many family occasions was I absent from? How many second or third dates did I not go on? How many times had I not been able to be there for others or for myself? How many of my reactions to stress or emotional strife had been colored through the lens of chronic pain? My sense of self was defined by this handicap. The impediment of expected pain would shackle my days and any plans I made. I did not see my own womanhood as something positive or to be celebrated, but as a curse that I had to constantly make room for and muddle through. Like the scar on my arm, my reproductive system was a liability. The disease, developing part and parcel with my womanhood starting at puberty with my menses, affected my own self-esteem and the way I felt about my body. No one likes to get her period, but when your femininity carries with it such pain and consistent physical and emotional strife, it’s hard not to feel that your body is betraying you. The very relationship you have with yourself and your person is tainted by these ever-present problems. I now finally knew my struggles were due to this condition. I wasn’t high-strung or fickle and I wasn’t overreacting.
Padma Lakshmi (Love, Loss, and What We Ate: A Memoir)
One of my favourite stories is about an old woman and her husband – a man mean as Mondays, who scared her with the violence of his temper and the shifting nature of his whims. She was only able to keep him satisfied with her unparalleled cooking, to which he was a complete captive. One day, he bought her a fat liver to cook for him, and she did, using herbs and broth. But the smell of her own artistry overtook her, and a few nibbles became a few bites, and soon the liver was gone. She had no money with which to purchase a second one, and she was terrified of her husband’s reaction should he discover that his meal was gone. So she crept to the church next door, where a woman had been recently laid to rest. She approached the shrouded figure, then cut into it with a pair of kitchen shears and stole the liver from her corpse. That night, the woman’s husband dabbed his lips with a napkin and declared the meal the finest he’d ever eaten. When they went to sleep, the old woman heard the front door open, and a thin wail wafted through the rooms. Who has my liver? Whooooo has my liver? The old woman could hear the voice coming closer and closer to the bedroom. There was a hush as the door swung open. The dead woman posed her query again. The old woman flung the blanket off her husband. – He has it! She declared triumphantly. Then she saw the face of the dead woman, and recognized her own mouth and eyes. She looked down at her abdomen, remembering, now, how she carved into her own belly. Next to her, as the blood seeped into the very heart of the mattress, her husband slumbered on. That may not be the version of the story you’re familiar with. But I assure you, it’s the one you need to know.
Carmen Maria Machado (Her Body and Other Parties: Stories)
Mara, remember how you kicked sand into that neighbor child’s eyes? I yelled at you and made you apologize in your best dress, and that night I cried by myself in the bathroom because you are Bad’s child as much as you are mine. Remember when you ran into the plate glass window and cut your arms so badly we had to drive you to the nearest hospital in the pickup truck, and when it was over Bad begged me to replace the backseat because of all the blood? Or when Tristan told us that he wanted to invite a boy to prom and you put your arm around him like this? Mara, remember? Your own babies? Your husband with his Captain Ahab beard and calloused hands and the house you bought in Vermont? Mara? How you still love your little brother with the ferocity of a star; an all-consuming love that will only end when one of you collapses? The drawings you handed us as children? Your paintings of dragons, Tristan’s photographs of dolls, your stories about anger, his poems about angels? The science experiments in the yard, blackening the grass to gloss? Your lives sated and[…]
Carmen Maria Machado (Her Body and Other Parties: Stories)
That was fast,” Jay said as Violet got into the car. “I told you I wouldn’t be long.” “Good, ‘cause I think we’re gonna be late,” he answered, glancing at the clock on his dash. Violet sighed. “Is this about the party?” “I already told you: There is no party.” And then he grinned at her. “Besides, if you don’t act surprised, Chelsea’s going to kill me.” “Ugh! I hate parties!” Jay reached over and slipped his hand around the back of Violet’s neck, pulling her toward him. She could smell the mint he’d been chewing on as she leaned into him. “Come on. None of them got to celebrate your birthday with you.” He kissed her once, softly, sweetly, on her cheek. “Let them have their little party; it won’t last long.” He kissed her other cheek and then her chin, and Violet felt her resolve slipping. “We’ll be out of there in no time.” His lips brushed her forehead; his eyes smoldered as he gazed down at her. “And then afterward”-he found her lips, lightly teasing her-“we can have our own party.” Violet sighed in defeat, losing herself to his very persuasive argument. “I think we’re gonna be late,” she whispered, surrendering at last.
Kimberly Derting (Desires of the Dead (The Body Finder, #2))
She had thought it was such a simple thing to avoid kissing someone when she'd been with Adam. Her body had never known what to do. Now it knew. Her mouth didn't care that it was cursed. She turned to Gansey. "Blue," he warned, but his voice was chaotic. This close, his throat was scented with mint and wool sweater and vinyl car seat, and Gansey, just Gansey. She said, "I just want to pretend. I want to pretend that I could." He breathed out. What was a kiss without a kiss? It was a tablecloth tugged from beneath a party service. Everything jumbled against everything else in just a few chaotic moments. Fingers in hair, hands cupping necks, mouths dragged on cheeks and chins in dangerous proximity. They stopped, noses mashed against each other in the strange way that closeness required. She could feel his breath in her mouth. "Maybe it wouldn't hurt if I kiss you," he whispered. "Maybe it's only if you kiss me.
Maggie Stiefvater (Blue Lily, Lily Blue (The Raven Cycle, #3))
Why did you break in Mrs. Casnoff’s desk for?” Information on Archer. After he left. “Ah. You’re welcome, by the way?” For what? She jiggled the nail harder. “For putting him in his place the other night. Working with The Eye,” she scoffed. “Yeah, that’s a brilliant plan.” He’s just trying to think of something,” I said automatically. I wasn’t sure why I was defending him when I’d basically said that idea was the stupidest thing ever to have stupided, but I didn’t like the scorn in her voice. Well, my voice, her words. Elodie paused in trying to open the desk drawer and shoved my hair back with both hands. “What’s it going to take for you to realize that Archer Cross is bad news? He’s an Eye. He’s a liar and a jerk, and he’s not nearly as funny as he thinks he is. And you’re betrothed to Cal. Boys who can heal all wounds and are super hot, to boot? Don’t exactly come around every day.” I don’t think about Cal like that. Pressing the point of the nail back into the lock, Elodie snorted. “Um, hi, I’ve been in your head. You totally think about him like that.” Look,, this isn’t a slumber party, I snapped. Can you please get back to work? “Fine,” she muttered. “Don’t listen to me. But I’m telling you, Cal is the way to go. Heck, if I had a body, I wouldn’t mind-“ I’m going to need you to stop right there. I’m ninety-nine percent sure she wasn’t going to stop right there, but before she could say anything else, the lock on the drawer gave way.
Rachel Hawkins (Spell Bound (Hex Hall, #3))
I reach out and squeeze her hand, and remember everything we’ve lived through together. The normal things we endured as we grew from girls to women. The days in school where boys would line us up in order of our fuckability. The parties where it was normal to lie on top of a semi-conscious girl, do things to her, then call her a slut afterwards. A Christmas number-one song about a pregnant woman being stuffed into the boot of a car and driven off a bridge. Laughing when your male friends made rape jokes. Opening a newspaper and seeing the breasts of a girl who had only just turned legal, dressed in school uniform to make her look underage. Of the childhood films we grew up on, and loved, and knew all the words to, where, at the end, a girl would always get chosen for looking the prettiest compared to all the others. Reading magazines that told you to mirror men’s body language, and hum on their dick when you went down on them, that turned into books about how to get them to commit by not being yourself. Of size zero, and Atkins, and Five-Two, and cabbage soup, and juice cleanses and eat clean. Of pole-dancing lessons as a great way to get fit, and actually, if you want to be really cool, come to the actual strip club too. Of being sexually assaulted when you kissed someone on a dance floor and not thinking about it properly until you are twenty-seven and read a book about how maybe it was wrong. Of being jealous of your friend who got assaulted on the dance floor because why didn’t he pick you to assault? Boys not wanting to be with you unless you fuck them quickly. Boys not wanting to be with you because you fucked them too quickly. Being terrified to walk anywhere in the dark in case the worst thing happens to you, and so your male friend walks you home to keep you safe, and then comes into your bedroom and does the worst thing to you, and now, when you look him up online, he’s engaged to a woman who wears a feminist T-shirt and isn’t going to change her name when they get married. Of learning to have no pubic hair, and how liberating it is to pay thirty-five pounds a month to rip this from your body and lurch up in agony. Rings around famous women’s bodies saying ‘look at this cellulite’, oh, by the way, here is a twenty-quid cream so you don’t get
Holly Bourne (Girl Friends: the unmissable, thought-provoking and funny new novel about female friendship)
That grip tightened again but this time he started rubbing his first two fingers against her neck in a soft little rhythm. The action was almost erotic. Or maybe that was just the effect he was having on her. She could feel his gentle stroking all the way to the pulsing point between her legs. Maybe she had mental issues that this man was turning her on. He leaned closer, skimming his mouth against her jawline and she froze. Just completely, utterly froze. “Are you meeting Tasev?” he whispered. She’d told herself to be prepared for this question, to keep her reaction under wraps, but he came to his own conclusion if his savage curse was anything to go by. Damn it, Wesley was going to be pissed at her, but Levi had been right. She had operational latitude right now and she needed to keep Levi close. They needed to know what he knew and what he was planning. Trying to shut him out now, when he was at the party specifically to meet the German, would be stupid. Levi had stayed off their radar for two years because he was good. Of course Wesley hadn’t exactly sent out a worldwide manhunt for him either. About a year ago he’d decided to more or less let him go. Now . . . “I met with the German earlier tonight. He squeezed me in before some of his other meetings.” Levi snorted, his gaze dipping to her lips once more, that hungry look in place again. It was so raw and in her face it was hard to ignore that kind of desire and what it was doing to her. “I can understand why.” Even though Levi didn’t ask she decided to use the latitude she had and bring him in on this. They had similar goals. She needed to bring Tasev down and rescue a very important scientist—if he was even the man who’d sent out an emergency message to Meghan/Wesley—but that didn’t mean she couldn’t let Levi have Tasev once she’d gotten what she needed. “I’m meeting with Tasev tomorrow night.” At her words every muscle in Levi’s lean, fit body stilled. Before he could respond, she continued, “I’ll make you a deal. You can come with me to the meeting—if we can work out an agreeable plan—but you don’t kill him until I get what I want. I have less than a week. Can you live with that time line?” She was allowed to bring one person with her to the meeting so it would be Levi—if he could be a professional and if Wesley went for it. And of course, if Tasev did. They had a lot to discuss before she was on board one hundred percent, but bringing along a seasoned agent—former agent—like Levi could be beneficial. Levi watched her carefully again, his gaze roaming over her face, as if he was trying to see into her mind. “You’re not lying. Why are you doing this?” “Because if I try to shut you out you’ll cause me more problems than I want to deal with. And I don’t want to kill you.” Those dark eyes narrowed a fraction with just a hint of amusement—as if he knew she couldn’t take him on physically. “And?
Katie Reus (Shattered Duty (Deadly Ops, #3))
As I became older, I was given many masks to wear. I could be a laborer laying railroad tracks across the continent, with long hair in a queue to be pulled by pranksters; a gardener trimming the shrubs while secretly planting a bomb; a saboteur before the day of infamy at Pearl Harbor, signaling the Imperial Fleet; a kamikaze pilot donning his headband somberly, screaming 'Banzai' on my way to my death; a peasant with a broad-brimmed straw hat in a rice paddy on the other side of the world, stooped over to toil in the water; an obedient servant in the parlor, a houseboy too dignified for my own good; a washerman in the basement laundry, removing stains using an ancient secret; a tyrant intent on imposing my despotism on the democratic world, opposed by the free and the brave; a party cadre alongside many others, all of us clad in coordinated Mao jackets; a sniper camouflaged in the trees of the jungle, training my gunsights on G.I. Joe; a child running with a body burning from napalm, captured in an unforgettable photo; an enemy shot in the head or slaughtered by the villageful; one of the grooms in a mass wedding of couples, having met my mate the day before through our cult leader; an orphan in the last airlift out of a collapsed capital, ready to be adopted into the good life; a black belt martial artist breaking cinderblocks with his head, in an advertisement for Ginsu brand knives with the slogan 'but wait--there's more' as the commercial segued to show another free gift; a chef serving up dog stew, a trick on the unsuspecting diner; a bad driver swerving into the next lane, exactly as could be expected; a horny exchange student here for a year, eager to date the blonde cheerleader; a tourist visiting, clicking away with his camera, posing my family in front of the monuments and statues; a ping pong champion, wearing white tube socks pulled up too high and batting the ball with a wicked spin; a violin prodigy impressing the audience at Carnegie Hall, before taking a polite bow; a teen computer scientist, ready to make millions on an initial public offering before the company stock crashes; a gangster in sunglasses and a tight suit, embroiled in a turf war with the Sicilian mob; an urban greengrocer selling lunch by the pound, rudely returning change over the counter to the black patrons; a businessman with a briefcase of cash bribing a congressman, a corrupting influence on the electoral process; a salaryman on my way to work, crammed into the commuter train and loyal to the company; a shady doctor, trained in a foreign tradition with anatomical diagrams of the human body mapping the flow of life energy through a multitude of colored points; a calculus graduate student with thick glasses and a bad haircut, serving as a teaching assistant with an incomprehensible accent, scribbling on the chalkboard; an automobile enthusiast who customizes an imported car with a supercharged engine and Japanese decals in the rear window, cruising the boulevard looking for a drag race; a illegal alien crowded into the cargo hold of a smuggler's ship, defying death only to crowd into a New York City tenement and work as a slave in a sweatshop. My mother and my girl cousins were Madame Butterfly from the mail order bride catalog, dying in their service to the masculinity of the West, and the dragon lady in a kimono, taking vengeance for her sisters. They became the television newscaster, look-alikes with their flawlessly permed hair. Through these indelible images, I grew up. But when I looked in the mirror, I could not believe my own reflection because it was not like what I saw around me. Over the years, the world opened up. It has become a dizzying kaleidoscope of cultural fragments, arranged and rearranged without plan or order.
Frank H. Wu (Yellow)