Home > Author > Kristen Arnett
1 " It hadn't felt necessary to learn more about my mother outside of her existence on the periphery of my life. She cleaned our clothes and bought us groceries. Made our meals, mopped and dusted, trimmed the tree. My father was the one I'd admired. He was the one I'd wanted to be like. "
― Kristen Arnett ,
2 " I'd hated that because it didn't feel how I expected romance to feel: stressful and kind of blood-soaked, a constant power struggle. "
3 " We spent so much time looking for pieces of ourselves in other people that we never realized they were busy searching for the same things in us. "
4 " Need, my father had written. To need meant to be vulnerable. It was one of the scariest things I could imagine. Needing anything meant you were open to invasion. It meant you had no control of yourself. "
5 " You don't know what love is, I thought, wanting to smack him. Love was the steady burn of acid indigestion. Love was a punch in the gut that ruptured your spleen. Love was a broken telephone that refused to dial out. "
6 " Though I shy away from friendly intimacy like hugging, but I’m fascinated by what fingers and thumbs and palms can do. Dexterity. Manipulation. The movement of our speech so often contained in the movement of our hands. Mine are birds when I speak, flapping until I ascend and reach the apex of my sentence. When I’m stressed, I move my fingers like they’re gears that power the momentum of my thoughts. Help me reach the point, I beg, as they open and fold and smack into each other. "
― Kristen Arnett
7 " Problem solving is hunting.It is savage pleasure and we are born to it. —Thomas Harris "
8 " What I should have told him that day: love makes you an open wound, susceptible to infection. But he was young then and so was I, and I wanted their happiness more than my own. So I swallowed my pain and let myself pretend love could flourish if I didn't stand in its way. "
9 " She wheeled around, chin set angrily. "My entire adult life that man told me what to do. What I could like, what was acceptable to talk about. It was like living inside a clenched fist. "
10 " You don’t know what love is, I thought, wanting to smack him. Love was the steady burn of acid indigestion. Love was a punch in the gut that ruptured your spleen. Love was a broken telephone that refused to dial out. Milo told Brynn he loved her and I could see from the look on his face he thought the words were a magical incantation. Say the word love and it’s there for you; say the word love and the other person feels it too. What I should have told him that day: love makes you an open wound, susceptible to infection. But he was young then and so was I, and I wanted their happiness more than my own. So I swallowed my pain and let myself pretend love could flourish if I didn’t stand in its way. "
11 " That was the thing about Bastien. He might run down some peacocks in the middle of a golf course, but at the end of the day he had too much love in him to deal with how shitty human beings were to each other. "
12 " I couldn't understand why he was acting this way. I took a breath, trying to think up something reasonable to counter his argument. "That is the stupidest thing you've ever said. "
13 " Though I planned out everything, my life was somehow made up of an endless series of unwanted surprises. "
14 " To need meant to be vulnerable. It was one of the scariest things I could imagine. Needing anything meant you were open to invasion. It meant you had no control of yourself. "
15 " The best way to get through anything at home is to just stay at work. "
16 " Too much feeling in his body to handle anything appropriately. "
17 " As she hovered over me in the morning light, I watched her finger trace a line from my face down the naked center of my body. “Where’s your seam?” Finger tickling, searching. “Where do you crawl out?” I put her hand where I wanted. We kissed and she searched for the place where I’d break open. When she finally found it, my insides shook and all my skin felt replaced with something new. "
18 " She wasn't sure if ghosts were real, but she believed in magic. Wasn't motherhood a sleight of hand? "
― Kristen Arnett , With Teeth
19 " There was a security in seeing myself mirrored back. "
20 " Some entrails we saved, some we didn't, but we always made sure the floor stayed clean. "
