185 Quotes by Lindy West

They were so nice and so earnest. What was the point of hurting them? Sincerity is an easy target. But I don't want to excise sincerity from my life. That's a lonely way to live.

We were just a hair's breadth from electing America's first female president to succeed America's first black president. We weren't done, but we were doing it. And then, true to form-like the Balrog's whip catching Gandalf by his little gray bootie, like the husband in a Lifetime movie hissing, 'If I can't have you, no one can'-white American voters shoved an incompetent, racist con man into the White House.

So no, excuse me, we will not play likability anymore. It's an endless runner—a game with no progress and no finish line—that women are expected to chase, that keeps us from doing the real work, accruing the real power. Chasing likability has been one of women's biggest setbacks, by design. I don't know that rejecting likability will get us anywhere, but I know that embracing it has gotten us nowhere.

But they tell you that if you hate yourself hard enough, you can grab just a tail feather or two of perfection. Chasing perfection was your duty and your birthright, as a woman, and I would never know what it was like—this thing, this most important thing for girls.

Abortion is normal, it's okay to be fat and women don't have to be nice to you.

We only get one life. Wasting someone’s time is the subtlest form of murder.

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.

Yet it seems like the more abuse I get, the more abuse I court - baring myself more extravagantly, processing opinions that I know will draw an onslaught - because, after all, if I've already adjusted my body temperature, why not face the blizzard so that other women don't have to freeze?Paradoxical undressing, I guess.

You can hate someone and love them at the same time. Maybe that's a natural side effect of searching for heroes in a world not built for you.