A Quote by Jeanette Winterson
The only sex education my mother ever gave me was the injunction: 'Never let a boy touch you down there.' I had no idea what she meant. She seemed to be referring to my knees.
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At 19, if a woman said no, no meant no. If she didn't say anything and she was open, and she was down, it was like how far can I go? If I touch her breast and she's down for me to touch her breast, cool. If I touch her lower, and she's down and she's not stopping me, cool. I'm going to kiss her or whatever. It was simply if a woman said no or pushed you away that was non-consent.
You're sad-looking," she said. "My grandson used to be such a happy boy. He used to write me stories. I remember the first story he ever wrote me, 'Once upon a time, there was a boy.' And that became 'Once upon a time there was a boy who wanted to fly.' And they kept getting better and better over time. I never found out if the boy got to fly." I gave her a small smile. If only she knew the boy's wings had been clipped.
[My mother] worked at thrift stores and she didn't have a high school education. She sacrificed everything she had for me and my brothers. I never went without. She showed me that she could put food on the table, buy us Jordans, we had the best clothes and she worked two-three odd jobs.
She'd always known he loved her, it had been the one certainty above all others that had never changed, but she had never said the words aloud and she had never meant them quite this way before. She had said it to him, and she hardly knew what she had meant. They were terrifying words, words to encompass a world.
[Amy Sedaris] is awesome to work with. She's an amazing person. She makes her own line of catnip toys, and she gave me a bunch for my cat. It meant the world to me. She also got me stuff for my daughter, but I was more enamored with what she gave me for my cat.
Not that she didn't love almost every boy she'd ever met, and not that every boy in the world didn't totally love her. It was impossible not to. But she wanted someone to love her and shower her with attention the way only a boy who was completely in love with her could. The rare sort of love. True love. The kind of love she'd never had.
...fact was she knew more about them than she knew about herself, having never had the map to discover what she was like. Could she sing? (Was it nice to hear when she did?) Was she pretty? Was she a good friend? Could she have been a loving mother? A faithful wife? Have I got a sister and does she favor me? If my mother knew me would she like me? (140)
When we were arguing on my twenty-fourth birthday, she left the kitchen, came back with a pistol, and fired it at me five times from right across the table. But she missed. It wasn't my life she was after. It was more. She wanted to eat my heart and be lost in the desert with what she'd done, she wanted to fall on her knees and give birth from it, she wanted to hurt me as only a child can be hurt by its mother.
I had never really heard of Meryl Streep before. Someone told me she was an actress and she'd been in a few things, but I said, you know, whatever. She showed up and she seemed somewhat inexperienced, so I gave her a few pointers, and I think she has a decent career ahead of her. It's always hard to tell these things in Hollywood, but I do think that she has some talent under there. I think she's a diamond in the rough.
It's a knack that my mother doesn't have. The only audiobook she ever did she had to leave after the first day, because she couldn't string two sentences together. It's about the only thing she can't do.
When I think about that kind of spirit, I think about my mother, who is standing here with me tonight. My mother is the embodiment of what it means to have a Texas spirit, because she wanted nothing more than for her children to have a better life than she had, to have an education beyond the ninth-grade education that she had, to live happier lives, more successful ones than she had been able to live. And you know what? She raised the daughter who ran for governor.
A girl has the power to go forward in her life. And she's not only a mother, she's not only a sister, she's not only a wife. But a girl has the - she should have an identity. She should be recognized and she has equal rights as a boy.
In the silence, she felt the past and the present shift and mix, but that was a mirage. There was no way to comfort the lost boy he'd been back then. But she had the grown male. She had him right in her arms, and for a brief moment of whimsy, she imagined that she was never, ever going to let him go.
A mother has, perhaps, the hardest earthly lot; and yet no mother worthy of the name ever gave herself thoroughly for her child who did not feel that, after all, she reaped what she had sown.
She wanted to eat my heart and be lost in the desert with what she'd done, she wanted to fall on her knees and give birth from it, she wanted to hurt me as only a child can be hurt by its mother.
My privileged upbringing and education and linguistic fluency gave me such proximity to whiteness that it stung all the more to still find myself outside of it. My mother, on the other hand, not only accepted that she would always be an outsider in this country but also believed it to be a finer fate and home than any other she could have had.
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