“Flirting is about confidence… That’s all it is… not your confidence. Hers. you want to make her feel like she’s the only woman in the room. It’s about putting a smile on her face, a spring in her step, a little blush and her cheeks. Say things that she’ll replay over and over again when she’s in bed.”
pg. 58
“Don’t be ashamed for liking [Pumpkin Spice Lattes]. The backlash against the PSL is a perfect example of how toxic masculinity permeates even the most mundane things in life. If masses of women like something, our society automatically begins to mock them. Just like romance novels. If women like them, they must be a joke, right?”
pg. 54
pg
“If a man wants to leave you, wave goodbye and lock the doors. You’ve got better things to do than chase a lost cause.”
pg. 52
“Look, man, men are idiots. We complain that women are so mysterious and shit, we never know what they want. We fuck up our relationships because we convince ourselves that it’s too hard to figure them out. But the real problem is with us. We think we’re not supposed to feel things and cry and express ourselves. We expect women to do all the emotional labor in a relationship and then act confused when they give up on us.”
pg. 34
“That’s really the main thing about being in prison. Too many men in one place. You’re stuck in there knowing that there is a world full of women who are putting out flowers, making things nice, civilizing the whole planet. But there I was stuck in a cage like an animal with a bunch of other animals.”
“He stood again and cried, not like a baby, but in the way that only a grown man can cry, from the bottom of his feet up through his torso and finally through his mouth. When a man wails like that you know it’s all the tears that he was never allowed to shed, from Little League disappointment to teenage heartbreak, all the way to whatever injured his spirit just last year.”
“I thought of Patrick and the multitude of certificates on the wall of his apartment, and wondered at the male need to display achievements, like a peacock permanently shimmering his tail.”
“I wasn’t sure men would ever understand the infinitely subtle weaponry women used against each other.”
“There are a million men, yes, until there is one.”
“Her English was stronger than she’d let on. The problem, she explained, was that most men weren’t worth more than four words.”
“…part of my mind wanders back to the boy I believed him to be. I keep telling myself he wasn’t real. The boy I knew and cared for was a fantasy, tailored specifically for me… Somehow, the person who never existed haunts me, worse than the rest of my ghosts.”
“Look- Jamie’s more than a character to me. He’s- he’s like a sort of blueprint for what I’d like to find in a man.”
“If we don’t let our boys cry tears, they’ll cry bullets.”
“All these old men want it to be like it was when they were young. But it’ll never be like that again, and they’ll never be young again, no matter what they do.”
“All her life she’d had little interest in the working of boy’s minds, which she imagined only as a set of flimsy pinwheels turning in the direction of obvious things.”
“He had pasted on his face a smirk with which Sarat was well acquainted. She’d seen the same look on so many of the other boys’ faces over the years. A self-satisfied grin…Even then, at such a young age, she understood that smile for what it was: a mask atop fear, a balm for the crippling insecurity of childhoods deeply damaged. They were fragile boys who wore it, and their fragility demanded menace.”
“He was three years older than she was, and a boy –a different species altogether. But still she sensed in her brother a kind of insecurity, as though trying to scare her was not some cruel way to pass time, but a vital means of proving something to himself. She wondered if all boys were like this, their meanness a self-defense.”
“A man whose mother won’t let him lift a finger is ruined for a wife.”
“Do you know how long the hairs in his nostrils are? I’ll tell you! He could wipe his plate with them. For the last fifteen years, I’ve been the one telling the barber to give him a trim up there, you know? Like he’s some kind of child. Do I mind? No! Because that’s the way he is. He’s a human being! Nose hair and all! But if I dare not to be as smooth as a ruddy baby’s bottom he acts like I’ve turned into flipping Chewbacca!”
“I like being a man but not what men often represent, and isn’t the whole point to take this muscle and scruff and sculpt it into something more?”
“Jamie Fraser was stiff competition for the merely mortal.” Continue reading
“‘Does he- is he one who knows what he is, do you think?’
Claire’s hands stilled, the clanking pestle falling silent.
‘Oh, yes,’ she said. ‘He knows.’
‘A laird? Is that what you’d call it?’
Her mother hesitated, thinking.
‘No,’ she said at last… ‘He’s a man,’ she said, ‘and that’s no small thing to be.’ Continue reading
women didn’t go in so much for the recreational sorts of mayhem that men enjoyed Continue reading
“I have always kent what it is to love a man- be he husband or brother, lover or son. A dangerous business; that’s what it is.” Continue reading
“A pair of bollocks may bring a man more sorrow than joy- though I havena met many who’d wish them gone, for all that.” Continue reading
“Lovesickness can’t be explained in any rational way. He was just a man. Arms and legs, skin and hair. Just a man. Nothing special about him. And yet there was. Something very special. Something that spoke to me and only me. I observed my obsession with a distant part of my mind, my only fear being that this might end too soon. Maybe today. Maybe tomorrow.” Continue reading
“I didn’t trust men. I wanted to trust them because I knew there must be some good men in the world, but the ones I’d known had lied to my face while plotting acts of violence. Women could be bitches, … Continue reading
“Wolves at least kill for a purpose. Men destroy because it pleases them to do so.”
“We’ll learn what there is to be learned, and not rely upon the accounts of men who think they know more and better than we do.”
“There is no power to being a sex object when you think about it logically. But beyond that the idea that sex sells. I’d like to challenge that directly because: the fact is that if sex sold- most women are heterosexual, and we are sexual beings- so why wouldn’t we see half naked men everywhere in advertising?
I would like to propose that something else is being sold here. To men, they are being sold this idea that they are sexual subjects, they are in the drivers seat. It makes them feel powerful to see images of objectified women everywhere. And for women, we are being sold the idea that this is how we get our value and this is the way to become the ideal sex object. Which is why, instead of sex selling, the idea of subjectivity and objectivity are being sold. So we see men’s magazine’s with scantily clad women and we see women’s magazine’s with scantily clad women.”
“With [her] in his arms, all other women- past, present, and future- simply ceased to exist.”
“Death [of a woman] turns all men into great lovers. Would that they were equally ardent while the lady was still alive!”
” ‘You just gonna stand around and watch him?’
‘There are worse things a girl can do.’
‘And I imagine you are thinking of at least one of them.’ “
“The barnyard can take some of the mystery out of the act, but a mans is not a hog, a bull or a stallion, though some do aspire to be one of the three.”
“You can’t control how a man expresses himself. Love him anyway.”
“A man doesn’t love a woman because she strives ; he loves her simply because she exists.”
“If I’ve given a man- multiple men- my most beautiful, sacred form with nothing required from them, then no wonder that’s left me feeling worthless at times. Why weren’t they calling, why weren’t they trying to see me again? It’s because my feelings didn’t matter to them, because for a minute, probably after too much wine or a few Jaggerbombs with my friend, my feelings did not matter much to me. I had wanted to be desired without expecting that these men should want to know my heart first- and they should!”
“Maybe if I started looking for what’s important in romance- not on the high degree of reckless abandon that a man triggers in me or how much fairy-tale effort is spent to facilitate our physiochemical interaction, but on the integrity and authenticity that a man brings to the table… then maybe I’d land lasting love the way my grandmother did.”
“Apparently the most important trait this doctor possesses is his semblance to the hero in a European romance novel- dark hair that sweeps to his collar, eyes blue-crystal like the sea, a smile big and shining with the power to comfort the most unfortunate of trauma patients or de-pants even the most resolvedly celibate female.”
“Every man who has ever succeeded at anything should thank the woman at his side who has dodged crowds in high heels to see him to the finish.”
“He is the only man in the universe who can conquer midtown Manhattan on foot, then spend two hours in a restaurant that reeks of French onion soup and still smell like something you’d want to rip out of a magazine and rub all over yourself.”
“She explains that when the right partner comes along for me, no, we won’t have serious conversations all the time, but when we do, I have to feel that he bears an impeccable capacity for hearing me- not just the words I speak, but the desires in life that radiate from inside me. He’ll see all that, and he’ll choose it. My hopes won’t be a threat or a turnoff; he won’t make me feel too high-maintenance or complex. In turn I’ll prioritize his goals as if they were my own- and sometimes even more important than mine. And, this will bring me some of the greatest fulfillment I’ll ever experience.”
“Unlike me, she was a connoisseur of all things male. She knew when they were cheating. She knew when they were talking trash to their friends. She knew when they wanted her number even when all they asked for was a pencil.”
“He had wanted her in all her unremarkable plainness. Beauty was for single instances or pleasure and no more. Beauty wouldn’t return affection.”
“Men come and go. They are like icicles. They hang beautifully, and look all shiny and new, but then they break off with a crash and the really bad ones melt.”
“One should never hope that men will rise to the occasion. They don’t as a matter of course.”
“She fell silent, unable to put into words what it was like to nestle against in Gabriel’s arms, to laugh with him, to relax against him, to make love to him.”
“I am very fond of unquestioning adoration. One cannot have too much of it from dogs or men.”
“Typical of a man… They always die inconveniently.”
“He’s male. I’ve noticed that sometimes the brains simply get left out of the package…”
“though [men] are delightful to play with, its best to avoid them… I’ve been married three times, darling, so I know.”
“Even if she sent him packing afterward, he was going to drop to his knees and beg her to marry him. He had no pride left.”
“He had quite possibly never had a woman’s total, undivided attention before- at least not while they both had all their clothes on. Maybe there was something to this story-telling thing after all.”
” A prince does not take advantage of a lady’s good fortune.”
“He was a god. The mighty king of all Ken dolls. And he knew it.”
“… and like most lovers he both rejoiced in what improved her and swore that he wanted nothing about her to change. “
” ‘All bulls do is fight and eat and get carnal with the cows. Isn’t that like every man’s ideal life?’
‘Cept every six years, they’re sold off and turned into hamburger and a new, younger bull comes in to take their place. Isn’t that like every woman’s ideal life?’ “
“Forget evil laughing little monsters. These guys had been touched by the Abercrombie gods. They were a blurr of toned, sun tanned perfection.”
“… his friends had always talked almost exclusively about x-box and whatever girl was wearing the shortest mini skirt at the moment.”
“Before me stood a person who was capable of cracking the Y chromosome code…”
“All the bitchy girls in the world are just a training ground for what men can do to you.”
“Men are wired by nature to take everything they can from you. Its their basic instinct to screw you over.”
“Men and stallions- there was no reasoning with them.”
“Is it possible that there is some sort of metaphysical justice in the anatomical fact that the male sex organ, which has been misused from time immemorial as a weapon of terror against women should have at its root an awkward place “of painful vulnerability.”
” ‘Don’t go up on the roof in that! That’s your good wollen shirt!’ He halted by the door, glared briefly at me, then, with rebuking expression of an early Christian martyr, laid down his tools, stripped off the shirt, dropped it on the floor, picked up the tools and strode majestically out to deal with the leak, buttocks clenched with determined zeal.”
“Likely it took women to get men to do anything much.”
“Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned, but the blokes don’t like it, either.”
“We’re fragile things, we poor men; ye trifle with our affections at your peril.”
“He was supposed to be perfect.”
“… to the casual eye everything seemed most decorous. Satin-gowned ladies curtsied and smiled over spread fans, brocade-suited gentleman bowed from the waist with a flourishing sweep of their hats. Voices were low and conversation apparently polite. But in fact they were gleefully at work destroying one another’s characters. The men, as they stood watching a pretty woman, boasted that they had laid with her, discussed her physical defects and compared her behavior in bed. The women yanked reputations apart with equal or greater vigour.”
“She was often right- as little as he liked to admit it.”
“Men, they were all vermin.”
“Men had failed her, but stallions would not.”
“Very well, my love. From now on, I’ll ask your opinion before we do it my way.”
“I’ve always maintained that a little bit of jealousy looks good on a man.”
“I have to go to talk to a horse about a man.”
“O God, you have given to mortals a sure method of telling the gold that is pure from counterfeit; why is there no mark engraved upon men’s bodies by which we could know the true ones from the false ones?”
“Which pretty much answered the question about what he was doing in my pool instead of his girlfriend’s: He was clearly mentally unstable.”
She didn’t need a guy at all. She had come this far without one, right? Besides, all they did was mess with your brain. Who wanted that?”
“They are like the hotness brigade…”
“Most men prefer to use their sword and shield as a substitute for intelligence, and by the time they discovered God gave them brains, they totter on the edge of the grave.”
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