185 Quotes by Lindy West

If you’re the very luckiest kind of astronaut ever, your big payoff is that you get to visit a barren airless wasteland for five minutes, do some more math, and then go home – ice cream not guaranteed.

It’s so pathetic, the tough-guy posturing, but so sinister, because, to put it plainly, that’s how black men die. Insecure, pee-pants white men assume that any disagreement is a life-threatening situation.

Yeah, personally I hate my period and think it’s annoying and gross, but it’s not more gross than anything else that comes out of a human body. It’s not more gross than feces, urine, pus, bile, vomit, or the grossest bodily fluid of them all – in my mother’s professional opinion – phlegm. And yet we are not horrified every time we go to the bathroom. We do not stigmatize people with stomach flu. The active ingredient in period stigma is misogyny. This.

We have to be the witches they’ve always said we are, and counter their magic with our own.

Nobody wants to sit next to a fat person on a plane. Don’t think we don’t know. That’s why – to return to my first-class flight – my foray into “luxury” was so disheartening. It wasn’t a taste of the high life so much as an infuriating illumination of how dismal it is to fly any other way. I realized: Oh. Flying first class wasn’t intrinsically special, but it was the first time in recent memory that I’ve felt like a human being on a plane.

So I was forced to go to school wearing a menstrual pad belt that had been in our first aid drawer since approximately 1961. If you’ve never seen one of these things, because you haven’t been to the antiquities museum, it is a literal belt that goes around your waist, with two straps that dangle down in your front and back cracks, ice cold metal clips holding a small throw pillow in place over your shame canyon.

There’s no “winning” when it comes to dealing with Internet trolls. Conventional wisdom says, “Don’t engage. It’s what they want.” Is it? Are you sure our silence isn’t what they want? Are you sure they care what we do at all? From where I’m sitting, if I respond, I’m a sucker for taking the bait. If I don’t respond, I’m a punching bag. I’m the idiot daughter of an embarrassed dead guy. On the record. Forever.

My dad is gone now and so is that Seattle, but walking in the places he walked, puffing up the same hills, turning the same corners, I feel him in the ridges and grooves of my city – we are close, superimposed, separated only by time, and what’s that? This is the only religion that I can relate to.

Comedy, in particular, is a tremendously powerful lever of social change.