Top 120 Lindy West Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “So no, excuse me, we will not play likability anymore. It’s an endless runner – a game with no progress and no finish line – that women are expected to chase, that keeps us from doing the real work, accruing the real power. Chasing likability has been one of women’s biggest setbacks, by design. I don’t know that rejecting likability will get us anywhere, but I know that embracing it has gotten us nowhere.”

— Lindy West

102. “You can choose to be permeable, to be curious, to be the one that didn’t die.”

— Lindy West

103. “Sandra Bullock is an unmatched charm powerhouse, and I feel like nobody acknowledges that anymore because she made too many comedies for women, and men can’t stand that. Watch Sandra Bullock in action. Watch Sandra Bullock in Speed and then tell me you don’t want to frame your spouse for a crime so you can marry her instead! Watch While You Were Sleeping and try not to send Sandra Bullock a thank-you card with $4,000 inside. I DARE YOU.”

— Lindy West

104. “So I was forced to go to school wearing a menstrual pad belt that had been in our first aid drawer since approximately 1961. If you’ve never seen one of these things, because you haven’t been to the antiquities museum, it is a literal belt that goes around your waist, with two straps that dangle down in your front and back cracks, ice cold metal clips holding a small throw pillow in place over your shame canyon.”

— Lindy West

105. “The problem with America is that we refuse to look at the problem with America.”

— Lindy West

106. “I graduated in 2004 with an English degree and a case of imposter syndrome so intense that I convinced myself I “didn’t have enough ideas” to become a writer of any kind.”

— Lindy West

107. “I think we can all agree that this fully checks out and that indeed it is men who are the true victims of witch hunts. Which they invented. To kill women.”

— Lindy West

108. “Misogyny is explicitly, visibly incentivized and rewarded. You can watch it self-perpetuate in front of your eyes.”

— Lindy West

109. “There is nothing novel or comedic or righteous about men using the threat of sexual violence to control non-compliant women. This is how society has always functioned. Stay indoors, women. Stay safe. Stay quiet. Stay in the kitchen. Stay pregnant. Stay our of the world. IF you want to talk about silencing, censorship, placing limits and consequences on speech, this is what it looks like.”

— Lindy West

110. “You have to swallow, every day, that you are a secondary being whose worth is measured by an arbitrary, impossible standard, administered.”

— Lindy West

111. “I wanted someone to love me so much. I did want a baby, eventually. But what I really wanted was a family. Mike wasn’t my family.”

— Lindy West

112. “I sometimes think of people’s personalities as the negative space around their insecurities.”

— Lindy West

113. “There’s no “winning” when it comes to dealing with Internet trolls. Conventional wisdom says, “Don’t engage. It’s what they want.” Is it? Are you sure our silence isn’t what they want? Are you sure they care what we do at all? From where I’m sitting, if I respond, I’m a sucker for taking the bait. If I don’t respond, I’m a punching bag. I’m the idiot daughter of an embarrassed dead guy. On the record. Forever.”

— Lindy West

114. “Common Sense” without growth, curiosity, or perspective eventually becomes conservatism and bitterness.”

— Lindy West

115. “You cant take good care of a thing you hate.”

— Lindy West

116. “And even though I would never phrase it like this, I agree that women don’t always get a chance to “fill our own vessels.” My dad worked all day. My mom worked all day, then came home and made dinner. Women do a lot. Women are neat.”

— Lindy West

117. “Our propensity for always, always, always choosing what is comfortable over what is right helped pave the road to this low and surreal moment in US history.”

— Lindy West

118. “I believe unconditionally in the right of people with uteruses to decide what grows inside of their body and feeds on their blood and endangers their life and reroutes their future. There are no ‘good’ abortions and ‘bad’ abortions, there are only pregnant people who want them and pregnant people who don’t, pregnant people who have access and support and pregnant people who face institutional roadblocks and lies.”

— Lindy West

119. “Contrary to what your friends’ hyper-consciously constructed Facebook updates would have you believe, life isn’t a series of discrete, pivotal, deeply meaningful lily pads. Life is a smear. It’s messy, indistinct and disorienting: pinball, not chess.”

— Lindy West

120. “What we could really use is some loud, unequivocal backup. Or, I guess, front-up. And not just in public, when the tide of opinion has already turned and a little “woke”-ness might benefit you – but in private, when it can hurt.”

— Lindy West

121. “It’s funny how our understanding of human evolution – of the point at which we were once our truest selves – can shift according to which restrictive diet is on trend that day.”

— Lindy West

122. “One time, I noticed that the little waxy strips you peel off the maxi pad adhesive were printed, over and over, with a slogan: ‘Kotex Understands.’ In the worst moments, when my period felt like a death – the death of innocence, the death of safety, the harbinger of a world where I was too fat, too weird, too childish, too ungainly – I’d sit hunched over on the toilet and stare at that slogan, and I’d cry. Kotex understands. Somebody, somewhere, understands.”

— Lindy West

123. “We were just a hair’s breadth from electing America’s first female president to succeed America’s first black president. We weren’t done, but we were doing it. And then, true to form-like the Balrog’s whip catching Gandalf by his little gray bootie, like the husband in a Lifetime movie hissing, ‘If I can’t have you, no one can’-white American voters shoved an incompetent, racist con man into the White House.”

— Lindy West

124. “Is it any wonder, after years of being told “Don’t feed the trolls,” American society has no idea whatsoever how to deal with Trumpism? The necessary response is social ostracism. The necessary response is to set firm institutional boundaries. The necessary response is not to reopen closed debates. The necessary response is to block and report, and by report I mean say the truth, over and over, until it sticks.”

— Lindy West

125. “Everything is a product of its time, and the whole point of progress is to make the future better than the present.”

— Lindy West

126. “You fail again, you start again. No matter how many times you fail, you can still start. Don’t let today swallow tomorrow.”

— Lindy West

127. “I don’t dream of dying adorable; I dream of dying calloused and wise, of looking my husband in the eyes and saying, “Remember that thing we almost didn’t survive? Aren’t you so glad we did?”

— Lindy West

128. “Crashing a pharmaceutical gala when you are a fugitive positively drenched in blood? This movie is from 1993, but that’s a 2020 mood.”

— Lindy West

129. “This is a movie made for women by a man.”

— Lindy West

130. “One of my podcasting friends told me that he does stick up for women in challenging situations, like testosterone-soaked comedy greenrooms, for instance, but complained, “I get mocked for it!” Yes, I know you do. Welcome. Getting yelled at and made fun of is where many of us live all the time. Speaking up costs us friends, jobs, credibility, and invisible opportunities we’ll never even know enough about to regret.”

— Lindy West