Shrill: Notes from a Loud Woman QUOTES

3 " Thanks for nothing, regular human mom. Footnote: nothing except for the unconditional love and support and meticulous care to make sure I faced the world fully informed about my body and reproductive health. "

― Lindy West , Shrill: Notes from a Loud Woman

4 " Feminism is really just the long slow realization that the things you love hate you. "

― Lindy West , Shrill: Notes from a Loud Woman

5 " There is nothing novel or comedic or righteous about men using the threat of sexual violence to control non-compliant women. This is how society has always functioned. Stay indoors, women. Stay safe. Stay quiet. Stay in the kitchen. Stay pregnant. Stay our of the world. IF you want to talk about silencing, censorship, placing limits and consequences on speech, this is what it looks like. "

― Lindy West , Shrill: Notes from a Loud Woman

6 " I don't have to justify its awesomeness/activeness/healthiness/usefulness to anyone, because it is MINE. Not yours. "

― Lindy West , Shrill: Notes from a Loud Woman

7 " I desperately want to help, but the truth is, I don't know. I used to hate myself; eventually, I didn't anymore. I used to be shy; eventually, I made my living by talking too much. "

― Lindy West , Shrill: Notes from a Loud Woman

8 " I used to try to be cool. I said things that I didn't believe about other people and celebrities and myself. I wrote mean jokes for cheap, edgy laughs. I neglected good friendships for shallow ones. I insisted I wasn't a feminist. I nodded along with casual misogyny in hopes that shitty dudes would like me. "

― Lindy West , Shrill: Notes from a Loud Woman

9 " 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. "

― Lindy West , Shrill: Notes from a Loud Woman

10 " Aham and I weren't getting back together-we swore we weren't, we couldn't-but when I wasn't looking, he had become my family anyway. "

― Lindy West , Shrill: Notes from a Loud Woman

11 " Loving yourself is not antithetical to health, it is intrinsic to health. You can't take good care of a thing you hate. "

― Lindy West , Shrill: Notes from a Loud Woman

12 " If you really want change to happen, if you really want to "help" fat people, you need to understand that shaming an already-shamed population is, well, shameful. "

― Lindy West , Shrill: Notes from a Loud Woman

13 " My body, my work, my voice, my confidence, my power, my determination to demand a life as potent, vibrant, public and complex as any man's. My abortion wasn’t intrinsically significant, but it was my first big grown-up decision – the first time I asserted, unequivocally: ‘I KNOW THE LIFE I WANT AND THIS IS NOT IT"; the moment I stopped being a passenger in my own body and grabbed the rudder...

The truth is I don't give a damn why anyone has an abortion. I believe unconditionally in the right of people with uteruses to decide what grow inside of their body and feeds on their blood and endangers their life and reroutes their future. There are no "good" abortions and "bad" abortions, there are only pregnant people who want them and pregnant people who don't, pregnant people who have access and support and pregnant people who face institutional roadblocks and lies...

For that reason, we simply MUST talk about it. The fact that abortion is still a taboo subject means that opponents of abortion get to define it however suits them best. They can cast those of us who have had abortions as callous monstrosities and seed fear in anyone who might need one by insisting that the procedure is always traumatic, always painful, and always an impossible decision. Well we're not and it's not. The truth is that life is unfathomably complex and every abortion story is as unique as the person who lives it. Some are traumatic, some are even regretted, but plenty are like mine...

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; and one that, because of our culture’s obsession with punishing female sexuality and shackling women to the nursery and the kitchen, I was socialized to approach with shame and describe only in whispers. But the procedure itself was the easiest part. Not being able to have one would have been the real trauma. "

― Lindy West , Shrill: Notes from a Loud Woman

14 " My mom, by contrast, never liked fantasy. When I was little, this made as much sense to me as not liking gravity or Gordon from Sesame Street. "I just like things that are true," she'd say. "Strong people fighting against the elements." I grill her so often on why she wasn't obsessed with dragons LIKE A NORMAL PERSON that it became the catchphrase in our house - strong people fighting against the elements. "

― Lindy West , Shrill: Notes from a Loud Woman

15 " People like Jim [a defender of punch-down rape jokes] desperately want to believe that the engines of injustice run on outsized hate—stranger rapes in dark alleys, burning crosses and white hoods—but the reality is that indifference, bureaucracy, and closed-door snickers are far more plentiful fuels. "

― Lindy West , Shrill: Notes from a Loud Woman

16 " We're all building our world, right now, in real time. Let's build it better. "

― Lindy West , Shrill: Notes from a Loud Woman

17 " my body, my work, my voice, my confidence, my power, my determination to demand a life as potent, vibrant, public, and complex as any man's. "

― Lindy West , Shrill: Notes from a Loud Woman

18 " Women matter. Women are half of us. When you raise every woman to believe that we are insignificant, that we are broken, that we are sick, that the only cure is starvation and restraint and smallness; when you pit women against one another, keep us shackled by shame and hunger, obsessing over our flaws rather than our power and potential; when you leverage all of that to sap our money and our time—that moves the rudder of the world. It steers humanity toward conservatism and walls and the narrow interests of men, and it keeps us adrift in waters where women’s safety and humanity are secondary to men’s pleasure and convenience. "

― Lindy West , Shrill: Notes from a Loud Woman

19 " I say no to people who prioritize being cool over being good. I say no to misogynists who want to weaponize my body against me. I say no to men who feel entitled to my attention and reverence, who treat everything the light touches as a resource for them to burn. I say no to religious zealots who insist that I am less important than an embryo. I say no to my own instinct to stay quiet. It's a way of kicking down the boundaries that society has set up for women - be compliant, be a caregiver, be quiet - and erecting my own. I will do this; I will not do that. You believe in my subjugation; I don't have to be nice to you. I am busy. My time is not a public commodity. "

― Lindy West , Shrill: Notes from a Loud Woman

20 " Denying people access to value is an incredibly insidious form of emotional violence, one that our culture wields aggressively and liberally to keep marginalized groups small and quiet. "

― Lindy West , Shrill: Notes from a Loud Woman