Sarah Mlynowski · 317 pages
Rating: (5.1K votes)
“That's our story.
How we became a we.
And that's what we are these day. A we.
When you're a group that can hear each other's thoughts, the line between I and We gets kind of blurry.”
― Sarah Mlynowski, quote from Don't Even Think About It
“Normal is boring. Who wants that?”
― Sarah Mlynowski, quote from Don't Even Think About It
“He knew he was sounding a little Holden Caulfield-esque calling everyone a phony, but he really did think everyone was a phony.”
― Sarah Mlynowski, quote from Don't Even Think About It
“We were not always freaks. Sure, most of us occasionally exhibited freakish behavior. But that’s not the same thing. This is the story of how we became freaks. It’s how a group of Is became a we.”
― Sarah Mlynowski, quote from Don't Even Think About It
“Since then she had changed so much in her thoughts, in her ways, even in her looks, that she might wonder she knew herself--except that the changes were all in the direction of becoming more and more herself.”
― Willa Cather, quote from Lucy Gayheart
“They unlike their deceitful brothers, uphold the laws of our realm.”
― Candace Knoebel, quote from Born in Flames
“You shouldn’t have to pretend to be as excited as I am just to make me happy. If it comes to that, you shouldn’t have to pretend to be anything around me. Friends should be real with each other”
― J.M. Richards, quote from Tall, Dark Streak of Lightning
“Only a man can see in the face of a woman the girl she was. It is a secret which can be revealed only to a particular man, and, then, only at his insistence. But men have no secrets, except from women, and never grow up in the way women do. It is very much harder, and it takes much longer, for a man to grow up, and he could never do it at all without women. This is a mystery which can terrify and immobilize a woman, and it is always the key to her deepest distress. She must watch and guide, but he must lead, and he will always appear to be giving far more of his real attention to his comrades than he is giving to her. But that noisy, outward openness of men with each other enables them to deal with the silence and secrecy of women, that silence and secrecy which contains the truth of a man, and releases it. I suppose that the root of the resentment—a resentment which hides a bottomless terror—has to do with the fact that a woman is tremendously controlled by what the man’s imagination makes of her—literally, hour by hour, day by day; so she becomes a woman. But a man exists in his own imagination, and can never be at the mercy of a woman’s.—Anyway, in this fucked up time and place, the whole thing becomes ridiculous when you realize that women are supposed to be more imaginative than men. This is an idea dreamed up by men, and it proves exactly the contrary. The truth is that dealing with the reality of men leaves a woman very little time, or need, for imagination. And you can get very fucked up, here, once you take seriously the notion that a man who is not afraid to trust his imagination (which is all that men have ever trusted) if effeminate. It says a lot about this country, because, of course, if all you want to do is make money, the very last thing you need is imagination. Or women, for that matter: or men.”
― James Baldwin, quote from If Beale Street Could Talk
“But I hurt everywhere, Mama. How do I make it stop?" She looked at me with a sad smile. "I don't know. Only you can figure that out. But try to remember something, Teddi: Never tie you happiness to the tail of someone else's kite.”
― Beth Hoffman, quote from Looking for Me
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