Animal Quotes

“May you not go around the world looking to fill what you fear you lack with the flesh of another human being.”
― Lisa Taddeo, Animal

“When someone suffocates you with what they believe is love, even as you feel your air supply being cut off, you at least feel embraced.”
― Lisa Taddeo, Animal

“She said women are considered strong these days only if they didn’t talk about things they loved that didn’t love them, if they didn’t get hurt or allow themselves to be occasionally humiliated at their own hands, when, really, strength was being unashamed to want what you want.”
― Lisa Taddeo, Animal

“The world had set me up to believe that it was women who went mad. It was simply women’s pain that manifested as madness.”
― Lisa Taddeo, Animal

“My father did not become the bad guy for me. Not yet. That day I hated my mother for killing my father, but also for all the reasons you cannot say. Part of my child brain hated her because she wasn’t young enough or even beautiful enough. Because she wasn’t strong enough. Or because she was too strong. Because she was so complex where my father was not. I hated my mother, in short, for being a woman.”
― Lisa Taddeo, Animal

“Men were always putting their coats around my shoulders. They mark their territory that way. It’s better to freeze to death.”
― Lisa Taddeo, Animal

“I believe all men have a rapist in them, just dying to get out.”
― Lisa Taddeo, Animal

“The man is nothing. It’s what you think you are missing inside of yourself. I promise that you are missing nothing.”
― Lisa Taddeo, Animal

“The men noticed I'd stopped playing. Men are never okay when you stop. I had a fear of angering a man. Of not being amenable woman. I had the fear of being murdered. To assuage the guilt that I didn't follow up the flirtation by fucking them, I gave the movers each a tip of fifty dollars.”
― Lisa Taddeo, Animal

“We were both getting what we needed, though I could have done without him. It turned out he could not do without me. He likened his relationship with me to Icarus. He was Icarus and I was the sun. Lines like these, which I wholly believed and still do, made me sick to my stomach. What kind of a girl wants to be a sun over a country she doesn’t even want to visit.”
― Lisa Taddeo, Animal

“Little girls don’t kill people. They’re just silly little girls. But almost no one understands a little girl. We begin hard as marbles.”
― Lisa Taddeo, Animal

“Let me tell you: men love cruelty. It reminds them of every time their fathers or mothers didn’t think they were good enough. Cruelty looks better on a woman than the perfect dress.”
― Lisa Taddeo, Animal

“Men and their dogs. They will bring them everywhere and never forsake them. Unlike their women, children. Dogs want nothing of a man except all the things a man wants to give.”
― Lisa Taddeo, Animal

“I don’t want you to continue the cycle of hate. I’ve been called a whore. I’ve been judged not only by the things I have done unto others but cruelly, by the things that happened to me. I envy the people who judge me. Those who live their lives in a neat predictable manner. The right college, the right house, the right time to move to a bigger one. The prescribed number of children, which sometimes is two and other times is three I would bet most of the people had not been through one percent of what I have.”
― Lisa Taddeo, Animal

“The older the man, the more my specialty. I knew that when I met God one day it would go well.”
― Lisa Taddeo, Animal

“There is no better invitation in the world than women laughing.”
― Lisa Taddeo, Animal

“He smiled. I could see clear through to his younger self. I saw older men the way they still see themselves. That was why they liked me so much: I was a solar panel, absorbing and refracting and reenergizing.”
― Lisa Taddeo, Animal

“One time on an island I swam in a green lagoon and saw through the clearness of the water the simple fact of my limbs. I watched the purple, red, and blue fish moving around my body and I paddled to keep myself afloat for a long time. Afterward, I lay down on the sand and concentrated on the warming my kneecaps and my shoulders. I can count moments like that on my hands. My dream is for you to have many such moments, so many that you notice only the times you slip into your own brain and recognize those instances for the traps that they are.”
― Lisa Taddeo, Animal

“When men tell you they are pieces of shit, when they tell you they are scumbags, they do it because they subconsciously know that you are hooked. It hooks you more. They push you away to pull you in and the most terrible thing is they don’t even do it on purpose.”
― Lisa Taddeo, Animal

“… my mother said to me, You love your father better, and that is all right. I thought she was being petty, but suddenly I could call up the pain in her eyes. The unfairness that I thought he was the better of the two of them.
My father did not love one family more than the other. It was that he didn’t care about either more than he cared about himself.”
― Lisa Taddeo, Animal

“One man like that can be responsible for every big and small thing in a woman’s life. A woman he isn’t married to whom he doesn’t think very much about at all. But it’s not the man’s fault. The man is nothing. It’s what you think you are missing inside of yourself. I promise that you are missing nothing.”
― Lisa Taddeo, Animal

“May you not go around the world looking to fill what you fear you lack with the flesh of another human being. That’s part of what this story is for.”
― Lisa Taddeo, Animal

“I’m intrigued by the idiocy of trust.”
― Lisa Taddeo, Animal

“Why do some straight women need to be beautiful in front of other women? If men were wiped from the planet, how long would that need linger?”
― Lisa Taddeo, Animal

“Let me tell you something, he said, looking into my eyes like an asshole.”
― Lisa Taddeo, Animal: A Novel

“Which I didn’t consider sex. Because the thing is, one could call it rape. It was half a rape, or three quarters of one. Like Alice said, there are rapes for which we shower, put on our nice shoes.”
― Lisa Taddeo, Animal

“I saw the rape in his eyes. I was wearing my white dress and laughed to myself, thinking how anyone would say I kept asking for it. I’d opined often with other women and with men that every man has a degree of rape in him. Women didn’t understand what I meant. They were alternately disgusted and confused. They thought I was stupid. But the men didn’t. I think they were impressed that I understood.”
― Lisa Taddeo, Animal

“Some people say they do work inside their own brain. They learn that jealousy is a childish emotion. They teach themselves such things. But I could do no work inside my own brain. The interior of my brain was a snake pit. I couldn’t survive in there alone.”
― Lisa Taddeo, Animal

“She was pretty, the kind of simple, inarguable pretty that I had never been. I was sexually attractive. Sometimes other women didn’t see it.”
― Lisa Taddeo, Animal

“The thing I didn't expect was that telling her about me would force me to look at myself, at the way I craved the love of men who would never love me. At the way I could not abide women who needed me. At the way I destroyed some while allowing others to destroy me. I felt sick with myself and, at the same time, unburdened. I thought I'd been honest with myself. But I hadn't. I'd been telling myself ghost stories my whole life.”
― Lisa Taddeo, Animal