Motherthing Quotes

“Maybe touching someone is the kindest thing you can do; making a person feel like it's okay to touch them, that they're touchable and not disgusting, is the easiest and best way to make a person feel good in the world.”
― Ainslie Hogarth, Motherthing

“Winter never lets you forget you’re alive. Maybe that’s why it makes people sad.”
― Ainslie Hogarth, Motherthing

“Boys are boys and they do what they want. Women want things too sometimes, but mostly they're just warm sensory boards for men to tweak and rub and learn about themselves and the world through.”
― Ainslie Hogarth, Motherthing

“What if Mrs. Bondy had been my mother instead? What might I have inherited from her? Good things. Maybe I would have wanted to be like her instead of how it is with my mother — where everything I do is to try to not be like her. Which is basically the same as becoming her in a way, how a shadow of your hand is both your hand and its opposite.”
― Ainslie Hogarth, Motherthing

“Eating, love’s natural, bloody conclusion that can never, ever be indulged, because then the thing you love is destroyed. And maybe not destroying the thing you love, resisting that impulse, is the highest expression of love.”
― Ainslie Hogarth, Motherthing

“I guess that’s what rage is: the point where your words fail the power of your emotions.”
― Ainslie Hogarth, Motherthing

“Women on daytime murder shows are always strangled or stabbed or chopped up for no reason at all, except that they're women, I guess, and to some men that means they deserve it. Women are lucky to get shot, really. I'd rather be shot than strangled. Thank you, Son of Sam, you were uncharacteristically good to us.”
― Ainslie Hogarth, Motherthing

“The work of women's clothes never more important than at the beginning and the end of their lives when it's tasked with broadcasting, as loudly as possible: please don't try to have sex with me.”
― Ainslie Hogarth, Motherthing

“For example, my name is Abigail and people call me Abby very easily and it does this thing to me where I like them right away. Makes me feel like I know them already and that they like me already. That we’re close and I can trust them. Like, even if I were speaking to some prisoner through thick glass, a giant villain with a million face tattoos and a big scar from the corner of his mouth to his ear, if he called me Abby, I might smuggle something in my vagina for him next time I visited, keep him liking me because now that I’ve got him liking me, he’s not so bad. Now that I’ve got him liking me, I need it to live.”
― Ainslie Hogarth, Motherthing

“We are each other’s personal pan pizza from Pizza Hut. Made for each other.”
― Ainslie Hogarth, Motherthing

“I guess that’s what rage is: the point where your words fail the power of your emotions. Maybe there can be happiness rage and sadness rage. I am in love rage with Ralph and sometimes it hurts so bad I could knock a patio chair over like that sloppy, gaping fuckhole, that rotten fucking fuck-ass boyfriend did.”
― Ainslie Hogarth, Motherthing

“Ralph was being pummeled by the full typhoon of his love for her, one of life’s cruelest tricks, that the extent of this love waits to reveal itself.”
― Ainslie Hogarth, Motherthing

“He told me that night about his darkness: depression. How he got sometimes, how it was physical: waves of pain drowning him, or not him exactly, but the thing inside him that made him him, and all he could think about was destroying the vessel, the sinews, muscles, pulses, that kept him tethered to the pain, bisecting the vessel’s veins like a vanilla bean, burrowing a bullet into his brain.”
― Ainslie Hogarth, Motherthing

“Humans like to put their mouths on the things they love.”
― Ainslie Hogarth, Motherthing

“Back in the ICU waiting room old Opal-eye blinks, turns her head, fixes her gaze on me, like she knows what I did, what’s hiding in my pocket, and a cruel thought violates the folds of my mind, residue left over from the evil impulse: I got the ring anyway, Laura, it’s mine now, isn’t it, now that you’re dead. I press my pocket, feel the ring’s undeniable there-ness. I need to close myself off to mischievous impulses and bad thoughts. But it’s hard because no one ever taught me how.”
― Ainslie Hogarth, Motherthing

“I bubble again with blinding-hot, spine-severing cumshitkill.”
― Ainslie Hogarth, Motherthing

“If she had any sense of herself at all, it was as a seed, carried by some shuddering and indifferent wind, waiting to be dropped into the place that would finally make her real.”
― Ainslie Hogarth, Motherthing

“Ralph.” He’s marching ahead of me, warm huffs caught and held by the cold. Winter never lets you forget you’re alive. Maybe that’s why it makes people sad.”
― Ainslie Hogarth, Motherthing

“Nothing else matters but her pain, the biggest, loudest thing in the world, unimaginable, a way that people only ever expect to feel maybe once in their life, if ever at all, and maybe never even really recover from.”
― Ainslie Hogarth, Motherthing

“We’re special, Ralph and I. Put together by good forces in the world and being in love like this is our real and actual job in life, everything else just maintenance. This love makes it okay to be stuck here on earth; makes it okay that these routines and aches and obligations are life and that’s just it; makes you open your eyes and see every little bliss a moment has to offer: Ralph and Ralph and Ralph and Ralph. In a moment. Is a moment.”
― Ainslie Hogarth, Motherthing

“Too much human touching will change a thing.”
― Ainslie Hogarth, Motherthing

“We change into our pajamas as soon as we get home because that’s what we always do, no matter who’s haunting the basement, a precious custom from our old life that we’ve managed to preserve here in hell.”
― Ainslie Hogarth, Motherthing

“Very good,” says the small man, whose name, like that of so many serial killers, is Wayne.”
― Ainslie Hogarth, Motherthing

“This love makes it okay to be stuck here on earth; makes it okay that these routines and aches and obligations are life and that’s just it;”
― Ainslie Hogarth, Motherthing

“There’s something unsettling about her. A bad omen. You wouldn’t want to catch her steady eye in the boisterous crowd celebrating a ship’s maiden voyage.”
― Ainslie Hogarth, Motherthing

“I love you, Carol. I’m sorry I wanted to kill you for a minute there, but I’m over it now.”
― Ainslie Hogarth, Motherthing

“What if Mrs. Bondy had been my mother instead? What might I have inherited from her? Good things. Maybe I would have wanted to be like her. Instead of how it is with my mother, where everything I do is to try to not be like her, which is basically the same as becoming her in a way, how a shadow of your hand is both your hand and its opposite.”
― Ainslie Hogarth, Motherthing

“The work of women’s clothes never more important than at the beginning and the end of their lives when it’s tasked with broadcasting, as loudly as possible: please don’t try to have sex with me.”
― Ainslie Hogarth, Motherthing

“A Good Woman recognizes that you can be good and bad at once. A Good Woman can acknowledge your humanity while recognizing the fact that you also need to die. That's why it's hard to be a Good Woman. That's why we're not all good women, are we, Janet?”
― Ainslie Hogarth, Motherthing

“I laugh, three unsettling has like a person whose only ever read about laughing in a book”
― Ainslie Hogarth, Motherthing