Sallie Tisdale Quotes

#1. Then she took up her practice, not to prove her worth or to be seen, not in dignity or fear, but as though she were giving her whole life away as a gift to the world with every step.

Sallie Tisdale

#2. 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.

Sallie Tisdale

#3. 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.

Sallie Tisdale

#4. How I became a better writer was that I kept writing.

Sallie Tisdale

#5. It is our peculiar punishment that we know things change and we want this to be otherwise.

Sallie Tisdale

#6. You don't write. You get out of the way.

Sallie Tisdale

#7. This is not a meritocracy.

Sallie Tisdale

#8. The sex that is presented to us in everyday culture feels strange to me; its images are fragments, lifeless, removed from normal experience. Real sex, the sex in our cells and in the space between our neurons, leaks out and gets into things and stains our vision and colors our lives.

Sallie Tisdale

#9. You don't know what your voice sounds like until you speak.

Sallie Tisdale

#10. To write the essay is to be haunted by our own lies. No story is the whole story. Everything we know is shadowed by what we've missed, forgotten, or been afraid to see.

Sallie Tisdale

#11. 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.

Sallie Tisdale

#12. 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.

Sallie Tisdale

#13. 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.

Sallie Tisdale

#14. 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.

Sallie Tisdale

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

Sallie Tisdale

#16. Sex can be renounced
but sexuality cannot. We can't avoid sexual issues by avoiding sex, or by dismissing its importance, or by showing disrespect to our own or other people's sexual feelings.

Sallie Tisdale

#17. Sex is a game, a weapon, a toy, a joy, a trance, an enlightenment, a loss, a hope.

Sallie Tisdale