Quotes from Elisa Albert

What even is a voice? It's the sound one makes with one's larynx. The way one makes oneself heard. Breath, vibration, a style of narration. Phrasing. And when you're singing from your bones and bowels, these things don't need explaining. Everyone can feel it in their bones and bowels, animals and plants included. An unpasteurized experience. Honesty is the ultimate life giver. What would you do with all the energy you'd save if you never had to lie?

I fear that this is what long term relationships are all about, at base: full-time role-playing, memorized and inhabited.

Life is exactly as terrifying as you want it to be.

It's fantastic, these babies and my boobs. People don't want to hear about that, don't want to entertain it. Vast numbers will watch two naked girls online shit in a cup then eat it, but babies enjoying the living hell out of breasts as supreme source of endless free nourishment and good health for all remains taboo. Explain that to me in a way that does not skirt the historical imperative of misogyny. Go ahead. Try. I'm

You have to know what people are capable of, and forgive them for whatever they're not. It'll

The C-list girls who just banded together to create their own little utopia. Those are the girls you want to be, it couldn't be clearer in hindsight. Early anarchists. Badasses. They didn't bother, exempted themselves, turned their backs and took up softball, computer science, gardening, poetry, sewing. Those are the ones with a shot at becoming fairly content happy/tough/certain/fulfilled/gray-haired grown women. An

I won't take your crap, you ungrateful little shit! You think the world owes you something? The world owes you nothing! THE WORLD OWES YOU NOTHING! NOTHING! NOTHING! My heart slammed: fight or flight? Flight or fight? What kind of pathetically damaged animal decides on . . . neither? Couldn't breathe. Tried to say help but it came out a stupid squeak.

When I see pregnant women, I want to take them by their shoulders and shake. I mean shake. Are you ready?

You saved yourself, gorgeous, Crisp said. You just needed a little help laughing about it.

You have to know what people are capable of, and forgive them for whatever they're not.

was so proud that night, so self-possessed, standing tall, fully inhabited. I owned myself, felt fully mine to give.

The baby's first birthday. Surgery day, I point out, because I have trouble calling it birth. Anniversary of the great failure. Ari.

Avoiding pain will get you nowhere. Avoiding pain multiplies pain exponentially.

did you know it's almost impossible to feel aggression when you're holding an infant?

Flight or fight? What kind of pathetically damaged animal decides on...neither?

Why can't we fall in love--true and deep--without it being some huge threat to the working order of things? In another life Will and I might rip each others' clothes off with our teeth and make a whole new world out of entirely different problems. But this is not that life, and I get that.