14 Quotes by Sallie Tisdale

Even the ways we don’t eat are based in class. The middle class don’t eat in support groups. The poor can’t afford not to eat at all. The rich hire someone to not eat with them in private.

This is not a meritocracy.

Everything I write is sinful, full of lies, especially the big one, the one you go to hell for: pretending not to be a fool.

The anger and shame of these women I hold in one hand, and the basin in the other. The distance between the two, the length I pace and try to measure, is the size of an abortion.

...is biology destiny? And the answer is yes, sometimes it is. Women who have the fewest choices of all exercise their right to abortion the most.

They are afraid to read out loud, fearful of being thought stupid or foolish or — what? I ask them. Girlish? Boring, says one Megan. (Which Megan? I can’t remember.) This is a terrible fear, I know — this fear of not being interesting — of being trivial, not special. It is almost as great, I think, as their fear of standing out and being special.

Sexual acts are one of the primary means by which we can act out our inarticulated inner lives.

By letting go of dieting, I free up mental and emotional room. I have more space, I can move. The pursuit of another, elusive body, the body someone else says I should have, is a terrible distraction, a side-tracking that might have lasted my whole life long. By letting myself go, I go places.

But when I look in the basin, among the curdlike blood clots, I see and elfin thorax, attentuated, its pencilline ribs all in parallel rows with tiny knobs of spine rounding upwards. A translucent arm and hand swim beside.