Trainwreck Quotes

And you said we wouldn't make it But look how far we've come For so long my heart was breaking But now we're standing strong The things you say They me fall harder each day You're a trainwreck But I wouldn't love you if you changed

Life is an endless series of trainwrecks with only brief, commercial-like breaks of happiness.

Do you think I’m a trainwreck, Ryan?” I huff a laugh. “You’re more like a cute little fender bender.

...our most constant and enduring relationships are with our siblings. After all, they're the ones who stick around our whole lives — even when we are complete trainwrecks.

You're about as subtle as a fucking train wreck. On a boat.

Fifteen Ways to Stay Alive 1. Offer the wolves your arm only from the elbow down. Leave tourniquet space. Do not offer them your calves. Do not offer them your side. Do not let them near your femoral artery, your jugular. Give them only your arm. 2. Wear chapstick when kissing the bomb. 3. Pretend you don’t know English. 4. Pretend you never met her. 5. Offer the bomb to the wolves. Offer the wolves to the zombies. 6. Only insert a clean knife into your chest. Rusty ones will cause tetanus. Or infection. 7. Don’t inhale. 8. Realize that this love was not your trainwreck, was not the truck that flattened you, was not your Waterloo, did not cause massive haemorrhaging from a rusty knife. That love is still to come. 9. Use a rusty knife to cut through most of the noose in a strategic place so that it breaks when your weight is on it. 10. Practice desperate pleas for attention, louder calls for help. Learn them in English, French, Spanish: May Day, Aidez-Moi, Ayúdame. 11. Don’t kiss trainwrecks. Don’t kiss knives. Don’t kiss. 12. Pretend you made up the zombies, and only superheroes exist. 13. Pretend there is no kryptonite. 14. Pretend there was no love so sweet that you would have died for it, pretend that it does not belong to someone else now, pretend like your heart depends on it because it does. Pretend there is no wreck — you watched the train go by and felt the air brush your face and that was it. Another train passing. You do not need trains. You can fly. You are a superhero. And there is no kryptonite. 15. Forget her name.

Once I started I couldn’t put it down. It was so addictive . . . like a train wreck.

If you stay at home, get married right away, never get a job, never display any unwelcome emotions, and stay away from the public eye to such an extent that you actually never make any sort of impression whatsoever, you can’t become a trainwreck. You become a miserable, sheltered woman living in a prison of her own making, but hey: At least no one’s going to disapprove.

I’m rather sentimental about the ruins—as a child, I halfheartedly attempted suicide there now and again, always returning from post-tourist-hours expeditions with knees winking with cuts, and the occasional fracture or two.

Yet the diagnoses don’t end them, or even really define them. Instead, their struggles elevate them, make them special: We all understand that genius and madness are connected. At least, we do when the genius is male.

Women who have succeeded too well at becoming visible have always been penalized vigilantly and forcefully, and turned into spectacles.

Faced with an existential threat, we cared more about hating the right woman than we cared about our own safety.

Enforcing silence is easy. All you have to do is make it feel like the safest option. You can, for example, make speaking as unpleasant as possible, by creating an anonymous social media account to flood women with virulent personal criticism, sexual harassment, and threats. You can talk over women, or talk down to them, until they begin to doubt that they have anything worthwhile to say. You can encourage men's speech, and ignore women's, so that women will get the message that they are taking up too much room, and contributing too little value. You can nitpick a woman's actual voice—the way she writes, her grammar, her tone, her register, her accent—until she honestly believes she's bad at talking, and spends more time trying to sound 'better' than thinking about what she wants to say. And if a woman somehow makes it past all this, you can humiliate her anyway.

Good-girl-gone-queer Lindsay Lohan, divorced single mother Britney Spears, Caitlyn Jenner with her sultry poses, Kim Kardashian having the gall to show up on the cover of Vogue with her black husband: All of them are tied to the tracks and gleefully run over, less for what they've done than for the threat they pose to the idea that female sexuality fits within a familiar and safe pattern. If control over women's bodies were the sole point of the trainwreck, that would be terrifying enough. But it's only the beginning: Shame and fear are used to police pretty much every aspect of being female. After you've told someone what to do with her body, you need to tell her what to do with her mind.

What is wrong with being too much? With being too big? With being openly sexual, openly emotional -- with having "no calmness or content except when the needs of [your] individual nature were satisfied," as Martineau wrote of Wollstonecraft -- or even with being openly unhappy? Only this: Insisting on the needs of your individual nature, being unquiet and unhappy when those needs are not satisfied, requires that you have an individual nature to begin with. And it requires that you not be ashamed of it.

To forgive the dead, to immortalize the dead, is not forgiveness. It’s one more sign of how impossible forgiveness is

You'll be loved even if you're a fucking train-wreck, you just have to find the junk dealer who knows your worth.

Women hate trainwrecks to the extent that we hate ourselves. We love them to the extent that we want our own flaws and failings to be loved.

And that ending, of course, is another beginning. After we’ve buried the trainwreck, and forgiven her everything, we have to deal with the sad fact that she can’t entertain us any more. The death of the trainwreck, and the orgy of public compassion that follows, is also just a very loud, noisy process of denial and distraction that takes place while the media trains its sights on the next lucky girl.

The only big weapon anyone has against you is that you’re human. Fucked-up, a bit. Imperfect, yes. In this, you are like every great human who has ever lived, male and female alike. If you’re slutty, well, Mary Wollstonecraft was pretty slutty. If you’re needy, my God, Charlotte Brontë’s needs could devour a person alive. If you’re mean, or self-destructive, or crazy, I assure you, Billie Holiday managed to record ‘Strange Fruit’ while being spectacularly self-destructive, and Sylvia Plath wrote Ariel while being both crazy and very, very mean. The world is still better with those works in it. Humanity is still lucky that those particular women existed, and that, despite their deep flaws and abudance of raw humanity, they stood up and said what they had to say.

I liked it better when you couldn’t be so sure. When terrifying rumors were distant enough to be a UFO at the bottom of Loch Ness. When the horribly compelling train-wreck tragedies of less fortunate people’s lives were only as real as you let them be. Just a cover of a magazine, a black-and-white photo on some late-night commercial for a charity. Now confirmation is just a mouse click away.

These women, with all their loudness and messiness, their public loneliness and weepy outbursts, their falling down and falling apart, are the image of our own vulnerable selves, the wild and agonized messes we all conceal beneath our hopefully acceptable personas.

And let’s be clear: The primary audience for celebrity blogs, tabloids, and reality TV shows is not straight men. Women are the ones who buy these stories. We’re the ones who enjoy them. We’re the ones these narratives are shaped for and aimed at. We’re the reason they exist. But what is it, exactly, that we’re enjoying?

So, we may wreck people simply to validate ourselves. We may wreck them because we’re jealous. We may wreck them because we fear the sight of public suffering, or because, well, everyone else hates them, so they must have done something to deserve it. Maybe. But then, there’s my favorite theory: Maybe we wreck people because they’re women.

He closes the door with a determined click, and I hear him call to a flight attendant, and I sink down onto the toilet seat, resting my elbows on my knees and my head in my hands as I listen to him through the door. "I'm sorry to bother you but my wife," he says, and then pauses. With the last word he says, my heart begins to hammer. "The one who now got sick? She's started her... cycle? And I'm wondering if you keep any, or rather if you have... something? You see this all happened a bit fast and she packed in a hurry, and before that we were in Vegas. I have no idea why she came with me but I really really don't want to screw this up. And now she needs something. Can she, uh," he stutters, finally saying simply, "borrow quelque chose?" I cover my mouth as he continues to ramble, and I would given anything in this moment to see the expression of the flight attendant on the other side of this door. "I meant use," he continues. "Not to borrow because I don't think they work that way." I hear a woman's voice ask, "Do you know if she needs tampons or pads?" Oh God. Oh God. This can't be happening. "Um..." I hear him sigh and then say, "I have no idea but I'll give you a hundred dollars to end this conversation and give me both.

Consider this book, then, a feminist anatomy of the trainwreck. It's an effort to figure out who she is: why she's making us so angry; what, in general, she hath done to offend us. These are questions of more immediate and personal relevance than you may think: When women look hard enough at the trainwreck, we almost invariably end up looking at ourselves.

Mental illness and addiction ruin women—make them sideshows, dirty jokes, bogeymen, objects of moral panic—but they seem to add to a man’s mystique.

our gruesome appetite to see women suffer, or to see them punished for violating our ideas of how women “ought” to behave—

We have to assume that misfortune proceeds from personal flaw. Any other explanation is just too frightening.

Women are not symbols of superhuman virtue. Women are not symbols of all that is disgusting and corrupt. Women, it turns out, are not symbols of anything, other than themselves.

Even if you do convince yourself to speak, someone else has to agree to listen to you. If they deny you, silence comes back. And it will swallow you whole.

Train Wreck and Car Crash hadn’t just referred to the continual disappointments they were to friends and family. Their collisions were legendary—and inevitable.

Harriet Jacobs was possibly one of the bravest women who ever lived. [...] She was scared, but she did it. That's all being strong is, apparently: being scared, or flawed, or weak, or capable (under the right circumstances) of astonishing acts of stupidity. And then going out and doing it all anyway. Trying, every morning, to be the woman you want to be, regardless of how often you manage to fall short of your own high expectations.

After two centuries of feminist progress and increasing female agency, the journey that started with Mary Wollstonecraft and seemed to proceed through to Hillary Clinton wound up with Britney: a reminder that no matter how rich, or important, or powerful she was, no matter how “good” or how beautiful she seemed, even the perfect girl would get drunk one day, or lose a boyfriend, or gain weight, or age, or get sad, or get sick. And when she did, we would be there. Ready and waiting to take her down.

I doubt it's a strictly factual account, but these attitudes are deeply imbedded. Which means that our only hope of changing them, of ending the wrecks, lies not in stopping or even changing the Internet -- even with the best blocking functions, report-abuse functions, real-name transparency protocols, and twenty-four-hour moderation in the world, hate (to quite Jurassic Park) finds a way -- but in changing ourselves, and our definitions of womanhood. We have to stop believing that when a woman does something we don't like, we are qualified and entitled to punish her, violate her, or ruin her life. We have to change our ideas of what a "good" woman, or a "likable" woman, or simply a "woman who can leave her house without fearing for her life because she is a woman," can be.

The promise of Plath's work was that a woman could de-fang the charges of hysteria by owning them. Unlike Solanas, who seemingly never saw herself as flawed or sick, or Wollstonecraft and Bronte, who swept their flaws under the carpet so as not to compromise themselves, or even Jacobs, who was honest, but played a delicate game of apologizing for "sins" that were not her fault so as to reach her audience, Plath took her own flaws as her subject, and thereby made them the source of her authority. By detailing her own overabundant inner life, no matter how huge and frightening it was -- her sexuality, her suicidality, her broken relationships, her anger at the world or at men -- she could, in some crucial way, own that part of her story, simply because she chose to tell it. And, if she could do this, other women could do it, too.

And, where white women are slapped down for daring to be sexual, women of color are slapped down for daring to be anything else: Over the course of her career, Nicki Minaj has spoken about abortion rights, the need for female musicians to write their own work, the difficulty of being an assertive woman in a business setting, and the obstacles black women face in being recognized as creative forces. She is the best-selling female rapper of all time, and her success had done a tremendous amount to awaken critical and commercial interest in female voices within a genre that was largely seen (fairly or unfairly) as a man's game before she showed up. Nicki Minaj has done everything in her power to frame herself as a thoughtful black feminist voice, up to and including staging public readings of Maya Angelou poems. And yet, approximately 89 percent of Nicki Minaj's press coverage, outside of the feminist blogosphere, tends to focus on: her butt.

I have seen ideas that work on paper not work in the field. But I have never seen an idea that does not work on paper work in the field.

If fate was life, then Lene should just stay with the “wife-beater”, because every man she hooked up with would beat her. I couldn’t believe that was true, for her or for me. I had to believe my shitty life wasn’t some prearranged hell I could never escape. I wasn’t doing the best with decisions, or money, or finding someone to love me, but I hoped I was finally on the road to controlling my ‘crazy’. And just to prove I had control, I was going to turn this train-wreck of a night around. I stood, zipped up my jeans, and kicked open the stall door. “I’m goin’ to par-tay!” I sang out loud. Party, but not get laid, I reminded myself.

Which brings us to the idea that silence is not just an unlucky outcome, for a woman. It may be the natural outcome—as far as many people are concerned, the ideal outcome—of being female in a sexist world.

But it doesn’t matter that we don’t have a diagnosis. We already have a name for it; we already know what disease you have when the doctor won’t say what disease you have. Add sexual overabundance to emotional overabundance, and throw in an element of danger or death, you have the sum total of what we once called a “hysteric.” Now, we call it a “trainwreck.

The preseason had been a trainwreck. They lost every game. Normally, she’d consider low attendance a bad thing, but it felt like a blessing. Now, on the night of the season opener, the pressure to win and garner the respect of potential fans, not to mention get the commissioner off her back, felt like an elephant sitting on her shoulders.

[Women are] responsible, not for taking care of our own bodies and lives, but for keeping society intact.

Everyone loves a goddamned trainwreck, after all.

Although I hate to read publicly, I began to get addicted to speaking publicly. For a grandiose opportunist like myself, AA can become a nifty little public speaking venue. As a professional comedian, I would often go for the laugh rather than honesty and growth. I began to chase the laughs with the same vigor and enthusiasm that I used to chase drugs and alcohol.

But none of us—not even me—are one thing. It’s all more complicated than our worst decisions or the slow-motion trainwrecks that make up our lives. I know you’ve…

How I could still be so naive after my trainwreck of a marriage was a mystery, one I solved just fine with a button.

But none of us—not even me—are one thing. It’s all more complicated than our worst decisions or the slow-motion trainwrecks that make up our lives.

How can I be the bigger person When the force you pitched me against Was a trainwreck?

Trainwrecks, as public figures, are necessarily also myths. But they’re the villains of the story; they’re our monsters and demons, images of what we fear, and who we fear becoming. I hated Britney early on, because I hated being forced into the role she seemingly enjoyed playing; I wanted to reject the feminine ideal she supposedly embodied, and I wound up rejecting her. But every wreck is a potential role that women need or want to reject; the magnitude of our hatred for them is determined by how powerfully we fear what they represent. In Britney’s case, she represented the end of youth, and the corruption of purity: She was the pretty, good little girl who became ugly and bad when she grew up, the “Queen of Teen” who was used- up and over-the-hill by age twenty-five. She was the Wages of Feminism, the working mother who tried to have it all and wound up nearly dropping her baby onto the sidewalk. She was the cost of public life, for women.

those who believe in facts and logic will quickly discover that the United States and its Allies are mainly responsible for this trainwreck. the April 2008 decision to bring Ukraine and Georgia into Nato was destined to lead to conflict with Russia. the Bush administration was the principal architect of that fateful choice, but the Obama, Trump, and Biden administrations have doubled down on that policy at every turn...

As a result of Trump’s train-wreck trade war with China and the rest of the world, Midwest farmers have lost many of their international markets; to mitigate the political damage, the Trump administration has showered them with “relief payments” to the tune of over $28 billion. It’s red-hat instead of red-banner socialism. But don’t dare call it that—it’s just the government redistributing wealth because of its failed attempt to manipulate markets and dictate production.

People are allowed to be screwed up. That's the most efficient realisation I have ever had. That people are allowed to be screwed up, to fall, and to hardly even make it at all. You're allowed that. Redemption is a part of life. You can be a train wreck today and a few months from now be an absolute winner in life. The problem is when you don't allow life to redeem yourself and others. It's a problem when you're severe and fatalistic. Let the river flow whichever way it may go! Let others die and come back to life again! Don't be hammering nails into coffins. Don't hammer nails into your own coffin, either.

If John Quincy Adams was afraid of Anne Royall, he had good reason to be. The woman was a goddamn Terminator. She could not be scared, and she could not be stopped: Court rulings, public harassment, and attempts on her life notwithstanding, she kept publishing until her death at the age of eighty-five. She wasn’t always right, or even admirable—she was on the wrong side of abolition, for one thing—but she was a historically formidable human being. And (Alice Morse Earle doesn’t even mention this) she was quite probably the first female journalist in the United States. And yet, for all that, she was remembered by successive generations as a crazy bitch who almost got thrown into a river. If it can happen to Anne Royall, who left a larger-than-average paper trail, one wonders how many other women’s stories have been lost to us, through the strategic application of “insanity” diagnoses or public humiliation. How many firsts are still waiting for us, in those moldy, decaying old books, needing only a little careful dusting-off to come back to life?

Every day brings me new evidence that women, by and large, do not like themselves very much: their ambition gaps, their orgasm gaps, their impostor syndromes, their poor body images, their endless variety of real or perceived failures, including their failures to feel good about who and what they are. Their trainwrecks, and their need for trainwrecks; the enduring, self-loathing need to find someone about whom they can say well, at least I’m not that girl. But, in the context of trainwreck media, a female self-confidence gap is not only predictable, it’s practically unavoidable. We can’t spend twelve hours a day mainlining ideas of sexual or emotional or aging or ill women as monsters, messes, and freaks, then expect to wake up feeling beautiful and confident in the morning. Every “ugly” photo of Amy Winehouse, every nasty word typed about Azealia Banks in a comment section, is going to come back the next time we’re vulnerable, and take yet another chunk out of our ability to believe that we can screw up and still be basically worthwhile.

Charlotte Brontë was a genius, whose work has resonated for centuries as an example of female intellect and expressive power. Her letters to Constantin Heger are some of the stupidest things I’ve ever read, a masterful, two-year-long demonstration of one woman’s inability to absorb the fact that the guy she liked did not like her. Mary Wollstonecraft was over a century ahead of her time on women’s education, and twice as far ahead on women’s sexual freedom. She still thought she’d rather drown than not have a boyfriend. Harriet Jacobs was possibly one of the bravest women who ever lived. She survived unspeakable atrocity, thanks only to her own daring, ingenuity, and resilience, and published one of the most important political documents of her age. And she was afraid that “educated people” would make fun of her grammar. She was scared, but she did it. That’s all being strong is, apparently: being scared, or flawed, or weak, or capable (under the right circumstances) of astonishing acts of stupidity. And then going out and doing it all anyway. Trying, every morning, to be the woman you want to be, regardless of how often you manage to fall short of your own high expectations.

Feminine ideals are a strange business. They seem to have been constructed, for most of history, to rule out pretty much every living woman. And “strong feminist woman,” though it’s managed to kick the can a few yards down the road—now you don’t just have to be literally perfect at all of your relationships; you also get a job, and it turns out you need to be perfect at that, too—can, all too easily, turn into yet another trap. Applied the right way, it can allow us to applaud each other for what we do manage to get right. Applied in the age of trainwrecks, it can become yet another mile-high yardstick, against which women measure themselves and each other, and invariably come up short.

We have been punishing women for doing public life “the wrong way” for as long as women have had public lives. And, as women have pushed ever more inexorably into the public sphere [...] we have developed ever more technologies and means by which to insult them. This may make entering the public sphere dangerous, and painful. But it is, perhaps, less painful to be punished for what you do than to punish yourself by never doing anything at all.

the only big secret that all that ridicule can reveal—the only big weapon anyone has against you—is that you’re human. Fucked-up, a bit. Imperfect, yes. In this, you are like every great human who has ever lived, male and female alike. If you’re slutty, well, Mary Wollstonecraft was pretty slutty. If you’re needy, my God, Charlotte Brontë’s needs could devour a person alive. If you’re mean, or self-destructive, or crazy, I assure you, Billie Holiday managed to record “Strange Fruit” while being spectacularly self-destructive, and Sylvia Plath wrote Ariel while being both crazy and very, very mean. The world is still better with those works in it. Humanity is still lucky that those particular women existed, and that, despite their deep flaws and abundance of raw humanity, they stood up and said what they had to say.

But maybe we should give Theroigne the last word here. God knows, she’s had to wait for it. “If we wish to preserve our liberty,” Theroigne said, “we must be prepared to do the most sublime things.” The first item on that list, and the greatest liberty you can claim, lies in deciding that you—human, fuck-up, mess, trainwreck that you are—may well be capable of the sublime.

Key word being minor.” Dr. Wu waves this away like it’s an insult. “I’ll take the girl who talked about the changing environment and O2 levels. And the redhead has some foresight, at least, so I’ll take her, too. I suppose these interns might be better than the train-wreck first batch.