Top 90 Lisa Taddeo Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “We pretend to want things we don’t want so nobody can see us not getting what we need.”

— Lisa Taddeo

2. “There is no humanity in humans.”

— Lisa Taddeo

3. “Let me tell you: men love cruelty. It reminds them of every time their fathers or mothers didn’t think they were good enough. Cruelty looks better on a woman than the perfect dress.”

— Lisa Taddeo

4. “One inheritance of living under the male gaze for centuries is that heterosexual women often look at other women the way a man would.”

— Lisa Taddeo

5. “Don’t let them see you happy, she whispered. Who? Everyone, she said wearily, as though I had already missed the point. She added, Other women, mostly. I thought it was the other way around, I said. Don’t let the bastards get you down. That’s wrong. They can see you down. They should see you down. If they see you are happy, they will try to destroy you. But who? I asked again.”

— Lisa Taddeo

6. “Naturally, my mother died. All mothers do, and they leave behind a trace of their wisdom, their fears, and their desires. Sometimes everything is obvious, marked for burglars. In my case, I needed a black light. There was a beauty in how little my mother wanted. There’s nothing safer than wanting nothing. But being safe in that way, I’ve come to know, does not inure you to illness, pain, and death. Sometimes the only thing it saves is face.”

— Lisa Taddeo

7. “It’s called the turning of the worm. You say the worm has turned when someone who has previously accepted tremendous abuse suddenly decides that enough is enough and seeks revenge.”

— Lisa Taddeo

8. “Women shouldn’t judge each others lives, if we haven’t been through one another’s fires.”

— Lisa Taddeo

9. “It’s the quotidian minutes of our lives that will go on forever, that will tell us who we were.”

— Lisa Taddeo

10. “Look at me. I put this war paint on, but underneath I’m scarred and scared and horny and tired and love you.”

— Lisa Taddeo

11. “He’s usually so quiet, but he’s talking now, and when quiet people open their mouths the whole world listens.”

— Lisa Taddeo

12. “He has said, Lina, you come from a place where women are taught that their only real value is what they can do for someone else. When you are actively living for yourself, you feel less pain. He sits down so that he is at eye level with her. Lina, he says, this may not be the most clinical thing I can say, but I’ve had many a fibro patient cured with a good orgasm.”

— Lisa Taddeo

13. “It’s like an ex telling you he is “talking” to someone new: you are aware that he means he has not slept with the new person, but if you are wise, you know the talking is deeper. Talking means there is going to be a relationship.”

— Lisa Taddeo

14. “We don’t remember what we want to remember. We remember what we can’t forget.”

— Lisa Taddeo

15. “She said women are considered strong these days only if they didn’t talk about things they loved that didn’t love them, if they didn’t get hurt or allow themselves to be occasionally humiliated at their own hands, when, really, strength was being unashamed to want what you want.”

— Lisa Taddeo

16. “The problem, she’s starting to understand, is that a man will never let you fall completely into hell. He will scoop you up right before you drop the final inch so that you cannot blame him for sending you there. He keeps you in a dinerlike purgatory instead, waiting and hoping and taking orders.”

— Lisa Taddeo

17. “This is an outlandish notion only if you don’t know how a person can destroy you by the simple act of disappearing.”

— Lisa Taddeo

18. “Sometimes there’s nothing better on earth than someone asking you a question.”

— Lisa Taddeo

19. “How did it end? someone asks, because women are often better at handling the endings than the beginnings. Lina understands that some women, like her mother and her sisters, truly care for another woman only when that woman is in pain, especially in a kind of pain that they have already felt, and then overcome.”

— Lisa Taddeo

20. “She felt life slipping. She felt that her body was being wasted, that her heart was resting like a steak on a cutting board.”

— Lisa Taddeo

21. “When you’re young you can do almost anything and it won’t be sad.”

— Lisa Taddeo

22. “So you can judge me for being with Aiden, you can all judge me. But I found something to take the pain away and until you have felt my pain, you shouldn’t judge me. Women shouldn’t judge one another’s lives, if we haven’t been through one another’s fires.”

— Lisa Taddeo

23. “Later she will text him, Thank you for taking the time, for spending so much time with me today. If you ask her how long it was she will say, Gee, I’d say it was almost thirty minutes.”

— Lisa Taddeo

24. “It’s more than fandom when a story touches you so hard that you wish the characters were your family.”

— Lisa Taddeo

25. “The rumours, as usual, didn’t take into account the complexity, much less the truth.”

— Lisa Taddeo

26. “A wife who closes her eyes to the first move. A third person who has eaten nothing all day. Someone turns on the music. Someone pours a drink. Someone reapplies lipstick. Someone positions her body in such a way. Someone is less hurt than he should be. Someone is afraid of her carnality. Someone is worried about not being sexual enough. Someone lights a candle. Someone closes a French door. Someone’s stomach drops.”

— Lisa Taddeo

27. “In the past Richard has said to her, I can’t believe nobody asked you if you were okay. He has held her many times when she goes back over the incident, when she tries to figure out what made her unworthy of care. They never said, Thank God you lived? Richard has asked her multiple times, as though expecting that if he asks her on the right day, she’ll say, Oh, yeah, actually, they did. And I forgot until just now.”

— Lisa Taddeo

28. “My mother never spoke about what she wanted. About what turned her on or off. Sometimes it seemed that she didn’t have any desires of her own. That her sexuality was merely a trail in the woods, the unmarked kind that is made by boots trampling tall grass. And the boots belonged to my father.”

— Lisa Taddeo

29. “When someone suffocates you with what they believe is love, even as you feel your air supply being cut off, you at least feel embraced.”

— Lisa Taddeo

30. “She is at that precipice, possessing, still, the dreams of a child, but now able to press them up against the potential of an adult.”

— Lisa Taddeo

31. “The gate that guards the reality of one’s childhood is high and existentially heavy, and merely opening it takes more energy than one expects.”

— Lisa Taddeo

32. “Dogs want nothing of a man except all the things a man wants to give.”

— Lisa Taddeo

33. “Sloane decided on the boat that day that she wanted to be unflappable. To be unmoved by the tides that might shift around her. To hold herself in her own hands. There would be moments that tested her, and she would look at each of those moments.”

— Lisa Taddeo

34. “And in addition to alcohol, Sloane would say there is one other component involved in how a threesome begins. It is these words. One thing led to another. The individuals involved can rarely tell you the precise moment.”

— Lisa Taddeo

35. “Even when women are being heard, it is often only the right types of women who are actively heard.”

— Lisa Taddeo

36. “Men were always putting their coats around my shoulders. They mark their territory that way. It’s better to freeze to death.”

— Lisa Taddeo

37. “It’s the nuances of desire that hold the truth of who we are at our rawest moments. I set out to register the heat and sting of female want so that men and other women might more easily comprehend before they condemn. Because it’s the quotidian moments of our lives that will go on forever, that will tell us who we were, who our neighbors and our mothers were, when we were too diligent in thinking they were nothing like us. This is the story of three women.”

— Lisa Taddeo

38. “He smiled. I could see clear through to his younger self. I saw older men the way they still see themselves. That was why they liked me so much: I was a solar panel, absorbing and refracting and reenergizing.”

— Lisa Taddeo

39. “Sleep is not sweet but dumb. It is a gap in time, a gap in pain.”

— Lisa Taddeo

40. “Disappointment would mean that you were occasionally used to things going your way.”

— Lisa Taddeo

41. “But the dissipation of dignity can drive even the strongest men mad.”

— Lisa Taddeo

42. “His distance is captivating and awful. He’s trying to control himself and succeeding, and she feels, acutely, how a loved one’s self-control can be cruel to the other person.”

— Lisa Taddeo

43. “There should be a stronger word than regret.”

— Lisa Taddeo

44. “Lina was raised not to talk about emotions.”

— Lisa Taddeo

45. “Her whole life stretches out before her, a path of imprecise but multiple directions. She could be an astronaut, a rap star, an accountant. She could be happy.”

— Lisa Taddeo

46. “Maggie is not even somebody that somebody hates. She is a nobody that nobody knows.”

— Lisa Taddeo

47. “May you not go around the world looking to fill what you fear you lack with the flesh of another human being.”

— Lisa Taddeo

48. “The way the wind blows in our country can make us question who we are in our own lives. Often the type of waiting women do is to make sure other women approve, so that they may also approve of themselves.”

— Lisa Taddeo

49. “They tell each other a few more times that they love each other. He looks at her, she is sure, like he wants to marry her. She’s too young to know that men can be like this one day and then not need to see you for a week.”

— Lisa Taddeo

50. “Hoy asks if Maggie has any plans to file a civil lawsuit. He knows that she did, in fact, because, as Maggie will find out later, his son worked for the firm that Maggie consulted with. She didn’t sign a contract with that firm, because its lawyers told her she didn’t have a case. The consult was therefore not protected under attorney-client privilege.”

— Lisa Taddeo