Jessa Quotes

“I was only attracted to him for, like, several minutes when I first met him, but I'm attracted to everyone when I first meet them. And then it wore off. It always wears off.”

“Creating love stories that stand the test of time.”

“Your history is not your future.”

“It is always easier to find your sense of value by demeaning another’s value. It is easier to define yourself as ‘not that,’ rather than do an actual accounting of your own qualities and put them on the scale.”

“We have to imagine something before we can build the infrastructure that will allow it to exist. We have failed here on both fronts: in imagination and in reality. Our great weirdos, from Emily Dickinson to Simone Weil to Coco Chanel, are seen as outliers, as not relevant to the way we think through what we want out of life. It's the same way we discuss radical feminist writers like Dworkin and Firestone. Dworkin is unhinged, Firestone is too eccentric to be taken seriously.”

“There are advantages to being labeled the victim. You are listened to, paid attention to. Sympathy is bestowed upon you.”

“It is our entire culture, the way it runs on money, rewards inhumanity, encourages disconnection and isolation, causes great inequality and suffering, that's the enemy. That is the only enemy worth fighting.”

“Women have participated in almost every fight for freedom. They were there when civilians were targeted they were there when the bombs were planted. To argue they didn't have enough power to speak up or they had been brainwashed by their male colleagues is to try to disassociate from the darkness that resides in everyone. And to disassociate from your darkness is to lose your power over it.”

“We don't do well with infinity and endless possibility, and so we break things down into individual units and into stories. And then we accidentally believe in those stories, and we accidentally start acting them out. Stories about what love is, what happiness is. What men are, what women are. Unable to shape our own stories about the madness that surrounds us, we get infected with other people's stories, trying to ignore the discomfort that comes with an imperfect fit.”

“Hannah, do you think that your mum and dad and Tate's mum and dad and my mum and dad and Webb and Tate are all together someplace?' she asks earnestly. I look at Hannah, waiting for the answer. And then she smiles. Webb once said that a Narnie smile was a revelation and, at this moment, I need a revelation. And I get one. 'I wonder,' Hannah says.”