"I've wished I were a habit for her, that when she fiddled absentmindedly with her phone she always thought to call me." 
-Voices Lessons by Cara Mentzel

"I woke up each morning and watched her dance in the sunlight coming through the curtains and thought, Jesus, she is the most magnificent girl I have ever seen.  Sometimes my breath would even catch and my eyes tear up at her effortless joy and perfection.  And then I walked to my bathroom to get ready for the day and swore under my breath at the haggard and fat reflection staring back at me.  Until one day it hit me.  In a few years Gigi will stand in front of her own mirror, hating her own thick thighs and giant feet.  She'll call herself fat and disgusting.  She might even think, for a moment, that it would just be easier to not exist at all.  I don't know what would destroy me more.  The part that she could even for one moment think that she is anything other than beautiful, or the fact that she learned it all from me.

Of all the hobbies I have picked up and dropped over the years - the fiddle, magic, competitive eating - body hate has been my most dedicated and refined.  And now with the birth of just one tiny and beautiful girl, everything I knew about myself had changed."
-Fat Girl Walking by Brittany Gibbons

"I hop in the shower and assure myself that behind every good woman is a little back fat."
-American Housewives by Helen Ellis

"The experience of being alive, it's isness, maybe in relation to the future isn'tness of death or maybe independent of that, or maybe a hybrid of both, can hurt so much sometimes.  Sometimes it still hurts so much to be alive that I want to die.  I am scared of dying and sad about dying and that is part of the hurt."
-So Sad Today: Personal Essays by Melissa Broder

"I think it was then that I first made the connection that underneath my anxiety was a great sadness.  When I suppressed the sadness, I practically shook with existential fear over simply existing.  I was fighting myself.  But when the tears flowed, I felt better."
-So Sad Today: Personal Essays by Melissa Broder

"For someone with anxiety, dramatic situations are, in a way, more comfortable than the mundane.  In dramatic situations the world rises to meet your anxiety.  When there are no dramatic situations available, you turn the mundane into the dramatic."
-So Sad Today: Personal Essays by Melissa Broder

"There is a large part of me, the committee, that wants to see me dead.  If it can't kill me, it'll settle for seeing me miserable.  It wants me spinning out on what I lack, talking to myself.  I don't know why these forces exist in me that want me to die, I guess I'm just wired that way.  But it's cool that there is this other part of me that must really want to live.  I don't have scientific proof of its existence, and I don't need it.  I'm still alive.  So I know it's there."
-So Sad Today: Personal Essays by Melissa Broder

"When I'm sleeping, the committee stays up all night and then greets me at dawn with really bad ideas.  It's like, Good morning!  Everything is shit!  Time to act impulsively.  But first let's start by getting into fights with imaginary people from the past.  Next let's catalog everything that's wrong with you and your life.  Also, I want to remind you of everything you don't have - and everything you should be scared of losing.  Let's begin." 
-So Sad Today: Personal Essays by Melissa Broder

"The thing is, I'm self-centered.  I guess I'd prefer some cosmic judge thinking shitty things about me, rather than nothing thinking about me at all."
-So Sad Today: Personal Essays by Melissa Broder

"Perhaps it is that I am of the stars and he is of the earth."
-So Sad Today: Personal Essays by Melissa Broder

"We got to be magic together.  But is magic even real?

I want what is unreal to rescue me from the world.  I want to be a shadow of myself dancing."
-So Sad Today: Personal Essays by Melissa Broder

"(The thing about spending eight consecutive hours in a confined space with the same people day after day is there will always be that one person who appears more special and attractive than he or she actually is.)"
-So Sad Today: Personal Essays by Melissa Broder

"I'm in love with you and you don't want anything to do with me so I think we can make this work: a love story."
-So Sad Today: Personal Essays by Melissa Broder

"I could say 'I love my body' so that I appear to be a good feminist.  But that only means pretending to love something I hate."
-So Sad Today: Personal Essays by Melissa Broder

"Until recently, I lived in a world where lost things could always be replaced.  But it has been made overwhelmingly clear to me now that anything you think is yours by right can vanish, and what you can do about that is nothing at all.  The future I thought I was meticulously crafting for years has disappeared, and with it have gone my ideas about the kind of life I'd imagined I was due.

People have been telling me since I was a little girl that I was too fervent, too forceful, too much.  I thought I had harnessed the power of my own strength and greed and love in a life that could contain it.  But it was exploded."
- The Rules Do Not Apply by Ariel Levy

"But you can never tell with shadows.  You have to be vigilant, always, because maybe you're crazy, but maybe you're right." 
- The Rules Do Not Apply by Ariel Levy

"Women of my generation were given the lavish gift of our own agency by feminism - a belief that we could decide for ourselves how we wold live, what would become of us.  Writers may be particularly susceptible to this outlook, because we are accustomed to the power of authorship.  (Even if you write nonfiction, you still control how the story unfolds.)  Life was complying with my story.

There were shadows I saw out of the corner of my eye that looked like problems waiting to become real, but you never know with shadows."
- The Rules Do Not Apply by Ariel Levy

"She grew up as I did, with her own bedroom, in a house with a garden and a green lawn, but with a sense that ruin was at a safe distance."
- The Rules Do Not Apply by Ariel Levy

"We want a mate who feels like family and a lover who is exotic, surprising.  We want to be youthful adventurers and middle-aged mothers.  We want intimacy and autonomy, safety and stimulation, reassurance and novelty, coziness and thrills.  But we can't have it all." 
- The Rules Do Not Apply by Ariel Levy

"We marvel at the unexpected ways people find each other."
-The Rules Do Not Apply by Ariel Levy