No One Is Talking About This Quotes

“It was a mistake to believe that other people were not living as deeply as you were. Besides, you were not even living that deeply.”
― Patricia Lockwood, No One Is Talking About This

“Modern womanhood was more about rubbing snail mucus on your face than she had thought it would be. But it had always been something, hadn’t it? Taking drops of arsenic. Winding bandages around the feet. Polishing your teeth with lead. It was so easy to believe you freely chose the paints, polishes, and waist-trainers of your own time, while looking back with tremendous pity to women of the past in their whalebones; that you took the longest strides your body was capable of, while women of the past limped forward on broken arches.”
― Patricia Lockwood, No One Is Talking About This

“White people, who had the political educations of potatoes - lumpy, unseasoned, and biased towards the Irish - were suddenly feeling compelled to speak out about injustice. This happened once every forty years on average, usually after a period when folk music became popular again. When folk music became popular again, it reminded people that they had ancestors, and then, after a considerable delay, that their ancestors had done bad things.”
― Patricia Lockwood, No One Is Talking About This

“Capitalism! It was important to hate it, even though it was how you got money. Slowly, slowly, she found herself moving toward a position so philosophical even Jesus couldn’t have held it: that she must hate capitalism while at the same time loving film montages set in department stores.”
― Patricia Lockwood, No One Is Talking About This

“The people who lived in the portal were often compared to those legendary experiment rats who kept hitting a button over and over to get a pellet. But at least the rats were getting a pellet, or the hope of a pellet, or the memory of a pellet. When we hit the button, all we were getting was to be more of a rat.”
― Patricia Lockwood, No One Is Talking About This

“I was just thinking that you and I...have seen very different memes in our lives.”
― Patricia Lockwood, No One Is Talking About This

“The future of intelligence must be about search, while the future of ignorance must be about the inability to evaluate information.”
― Patricia Lockwood, No One Is Talking About This

“Previously these communities were imposed on us, along with their mental weather. Now we chose them—or believed that we did. A person might join a site to look at pictures of her nephew and five years later believe in a flat earth.”
― Patricia Lockwood, No One Is Talking About This

“There is still a real life to be lived, there are still real things to be done.”
― Patricia Lockwood, No One Is Talking About This

“The things she wanted the baby to know seemed small, so small. How it felt to go to a grocery store on vacation; to wake at three a.m. and run your whole life through your fingertips; first library card; new lipstick; a toe going numb for two months because you wore borrowed shoes to a friend’s wedding; Thursday; October; “She’s Like the Wind” in a dentist’s office; driver’s license picture where you look like a killer; getting your bathing suit back on after you go to the bathroom; touching a cymbal for sound and then touching it again for silence; playing house in the refrigerator box; letting a match burn down to the fingerprints; one hand in the Scrabble bag and then I I I O U E A; eyes racing to the end of Villette (skip the parts about the crétin, sweetheart); hamburger wrappers on a road trip; the twist of a heavy red apple in an orchard; word on the tip of the tongue; the portal, but just for a minute.”
― Patricia Lockwood, No One Is Talking About This

“to live in a country where someone can say “the massacre” and you don’t have to ask which one.”
― Patricia Lockwood, No One Is Talking About This

“What do you mean you've been spying on me, with this thing in my hand that is an eye?”
― Patricia Lockwood, No One Is Talking About This

“Back in her childhood she used to have holy feelings, knifelike flashes that laid the earth open like a blue watermelon, when the sun came down to her like an elevator she was sure she could step inside and be lifted up, up, past all bad luck, past every skipped thirteenth floor in every building human beings had ever built. She would have these holy days and walk home from school and think, After this I will be able to be nice to my mother, but she never ever was. After this I will be able to talk only about what matters, life and death and what comes after, but she still went on about the weather.”
― Patricia Lockwood, No One Is Talking About This

“He did not want to live in the world he had made, but when it came right down to it, did any of us?”
― Patricia Lockwood, No One Is Talking About This

“Back in 1999, she had watched five episodes of The Sopranos and immediately wanted to be involved in organized crime. Not the shooting part, the part where they all sat around in restaurants.”
― Patricia Lockwood, No One Is Talking About This

“Every day their attention must turn, like the shine on a school of fish, all at once, toward a new person to hate. Sometimes the subject was a war criminal, but other times it was someone who made a heinous substitution in guacamole.”
― Patricia Lockwood, No One Is Talking About This

“Every day we were seeing new evidence that suggested it was the portal that had allowed the dictator to rise to power. This was humiliating. It would be like discovering that the Vietnam War was secretly caused by ham radios, or that Napoleon was operating exclusively on the advice of a parrot named Brian.”
― Patricia Lockwood, No One Is Talking About This

“In contrast with her generation, which had spent most of its time online learning to code so that it could add crude butterfly animations to the backgrounds of its weblogs, the generation immediately following had spent most of its time online making incredibly bigoted jokes in order to laugh at the idiots who were stupid enough to think they meant it. Except after a while they did mean it, and then somehow at the end of it they were Nazis. Was this always how it happened?”
― Patricia Lockwood, No One Is Talking About This

“But how strange, she had thought, biting into a slice of bread-and-butter that tasted like sunshine in green fields, to live in a country where someone can say “the massacre” and you don’t have to ask which one.”
― Patricia Lockwood, No One Is Talking About This

“The moon fell into her window and woke her.”
― Patricia Lockwood, No One Is Talking About This

“The more closely we could associate a diet with cavemen, the more we loved it. Cavemen were not famous for living a long time, but they were famous for being exactly what the fuck they were supposed to be, something we could no longer say about ourselves. A caveman knew what he was; the adjective was a sheltering stone curve over his head. A man alone under the sky had no idea.”
― Patricia Lockwood, No One Is Talking About This

“They kept raising their hands excitedly to high-five, for they had discovered something even better than being soulmates: that they were exactly, and happily, and hopelessly, the same amount of online.”
― Patricia Lockwood, No One Is Talking About This

“When something of hers sparked and spread in the portal, it blazed away the morning and afternoon, it blazed like the new California, which we had come to accept as being always on fire. She ran back and forth in the flames, not eating or drinking, emitting a high-pitched sound most humans couldn’t hear. After a while her husband might burst through that wall of swimming red to rescue her, but she would twist away and kick him in the nuts, screaming, “My whole life is in there!” as the day she was standing on broke away and fell into the sea.”
― Patricia Lockwood, No One Is Talking About This

“I just don't want people to be scared of her," her sister had said when they first received the diagnosis, but now that the baby was here the whole family had turned to a huge blue defiant stare that moved as a part through the waves, with the fear of the world curling tall on either side of them. They wanted - what? - to take the sun by the face and force it down: Look at her! Look! Shine on her! Shine! Shine!”
― Patricia Lockwood, No One Is Talking About This

“To future historians, nothing will explain our behavior, except, and hear me out,
a mass outbreak of ergotism caused by contaminated rye stores?”
― Patricia Lockwood, No One Is Talking About This

“One day they had the idea to hold a toy piano up to her bare feet, and at the first note she struck she uttered a sound of wild outrage - that they had been letting her kick against air and nothingness when she could have been kicking against music this whole time.”
― Patricia Lockwood, No One Is Talking About This

“When she set the portal down, the Thread tugged her back toward it. She could not help following it. This might be the one that connected everything, that would knit her to an indestructible coherence.”
― Patricia Lockwood, No One Is Talking About This

“Previously these communities were imposed on us, along with their mental weather. Now we chose them - or believed that we did. A person might join a site to look at pictures of her nephew and five years later believe in a flat earth.”
― Patricia Lockwood, No One Is Talking About This

“NOT my america, a perfectly nice woman posted, and for some reason she responded, damn, I agree . . . we didn’t trap george washington’s head in a quarter for this”
― Patricia Lockwood, No One Is Talking About This

“Every day their attention must turn, like the shine on a school of fish, all at once, toward a new person to hate.”
― Patricia Lockwood, No One Is Talking About This