Top 90 Lisa Taddeo Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “He is a loaf of man.”

— Lisa Taddeo

52. “There was a beauty in how little my mother wanted.”

— Lisa Taddeo

53. “She rationalized it. She said to herself, This girl came on to me. It wasn’t that Richard said, I want you to make out with this girl. It was her and me, at the beach. And it’s him and me first, and this girl is just an additive. She is something fun.”

— Lisa Taddeo

54. “She’s never understood exactly what it means to seethe until tonight. She’s never understood that pain can so easily feel like the most crippling anger.”

— Lisa Taddeo

55. “When you are actively living for yourself, you feel less pain.”

— Lisa Taddeo

56. “It was as though the company was saying, We will give you this bit to survive, but you must stay where you are, in your place.”

— Lisa Taddeo

57. “It’s a sad feeling when an obsession becomes slightly less obsessive. It’s as though she realizes she doesn’t have it in her to die for her own heart.”

— Lisa Taddeo

58. “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.”

— Lisa Taddeo

59. “She had not quite figured it out, who she was and what she wanted, after all, and that discovery, that there was yet more to discover, didn’t make her feel excited about the balance of her life. It made her feel tired.”

— Lisa Taddeo

60. “My father did not become the bad guy for me. Not yet. That day I hated my mother for killing my father, but also for all the reasons you cannot say. Part of my child brain hated her because she wasn’t young enough or even beautiful enough. Because she wasn’t strong enough. Or because she was too strong. Because she was so complex where my father was not. I hated my mother, in short, for being a woman.”

— Lisa Taddeo

61. “But life knows when to throw in a plot twist. It is an idle but seasoned screenwriter, drinking beers alone and cultivating its archery.”

— Lisa Taddeo

62. “Women have the upper hand. It’s taken me half a lifetime to realize it. We don’t actually care about the man who is bringing flowers to another woman. River was a stand-in for Jack. All present men are stand-ins for former men. And all men are stand-ins for our fathers. And even our fathers mean less than our own self-preservation. May you not go around the world looking to fill what you fear you lack with the flesh of another human being. That’s part of what this story is for.”

— Lisa Taddeo

63. “Little girls don’t kill people. They’re just silly little girls. But almost no one understands a little girl. We begin hard as marbles.”

— Lisa Taddeo

64. “Some women wait because if they don’t, there’s a threat of evanescence. He is the only one, in the moment, whom she believes she will ever desire.”

— Lisa Taddeo

65. “We were both getting what we needed, though I could have done without him. It turned out he could not do without me. He likened his relationship with me to Icarus. He was Icarus and I was the sun. Lines like these, which I wholly believed and still do, made me sick to my stomach. What kind of a girl wants to be a sun over a country she doesn’t even want to visit.”

— Lisa Taddeo

66. “I wish I didn’t love her, she wrote one day. You can’t unlove someone, I wrote. You can only hate them. She’s too broken to hate. I’m sorry, I wrote.”

— Lisa Taddeo

67. “It’s Friday, which doesn’t mean anything because her Fridays are pretty much like Tuesdays and if anything Tuesdays are better than Fridays because at least on Tuesdays you can be sure everyone else is doing nothing much, just like you.”

— Lisa Taddeo

68. “One man like that can be responsible for every big and small thing in a woman’s life. A woman he isn’t married to whom he doesn’t think very much about at all. But it’s not the man’s fault. The man is nothing. It’s what you think you are missing inside of yourself. I promise that you are missing nothing.”

— Lisa Taddeo

69. “She thinks of a growing season, knows that if you miss the month of March for planting mustard greens, you have to wait a whole year to plant them.”

— Lisa Taddeo

70. “Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Kim Novak in Vertigo. Those women moved under a gauze of smoke and intrigue. Most exhilaratingly, they did not apologize for themselves.”

— Lisa Taddeo

71. “Men and their dogs. They will bring them everywhere and never forsake them. Unlike their women, children. Dogs want nothing of a man except all the things a man wants to give.”

— Lisa Taddeo

72. “There is no better invitation in the world than women laughing.”

— Lisa Taddeo

73. “The world had set me up to believe that it was women who went mad. It was simply women’s pain that manifested as madness.”

— Lisa Taddeo

74. “Lina believes that getting laid by the person you think is the most attractive at that moment is the most important biological need that many people subvert on an hourly basis.”

— Lisa Taddeo

75. “There came a soggy fall afternoon. The kind that feels stately, that even if you live in a not-beautiful place, the streets seem to glow with elegance. The leaves smelled dead in that very pungent way that is almost the opposite of death.”

— Lisa Taddeo

76. “I was amazed. I felt special, I felt wanted. An older man was going to leave his wife for me.”

— Lisa Taddeo

77. “And if he only knew how perfect she was for him. He would stroke her face and say, Kid, I hate that we wasted so much time.”

— Lisa Taddeo

78. “Like many girls her age, Maggie is laid out before the world, unafraid, unpopulated. Men come to insert themselves, they turn a girl into a city. When they leave, their residue remains, the discoloration on the wood where the sun came through every day for many days, until one day it didn’t.”

— Lisa Taddeo

79. “He looked a little wounded, and I realized that true power came from not caring about anyone. That was the last time I would sleep with a man. I was through with the gender.”

— Lisa Taddeo

80. “Some people say they do work inside their own brain. They learn that jealousy is a childish emotion. They teach themselves such things. But I could do no work inside my own brain. The interior of my brain was a snake pit. I couldn’t survive in there alone.”

— Lisa Taddeo

81. “People don’t want to know that many bad things can happen to one person or around one person. A bad thing happens and coworkers circle your cubicle, their grating palms on your shoulders. Another bad thing happens and you’re no longer someone upon whom they could try out their munificence. You’re a squashed pack of Merits on the highway.”

— Lisa Taddeo

82. “She was pretty, the kind of simple, inarguable pretty that I had never been. I was sexually attractive. Sometimes other women didn’t see it.”

— Lisa Taddeo

83. “She thinks people on a screen are more valuable than she is. Maybe you know better, but you are no better.”

— Lisa Taddeo

84. “Some women want careers as much as or more than they want love but all Lina has ever wanted is to be fully in love and forever partnered, like a penguin.”

— Lisa Taddeo

85. “The older the man, the more my specialty. I knew that when I met God one day it would go well.”

— Lisa Taddeo

86. “So many more terrible things will come to pass after the collapse that I wonder how big a deal it will seem to you.”

— Lisa Taddeo

87. “Become More Beautiful – you wrote at the top of the vision board. But you couldn’t do that. So you became everything else.”

— Lisa Taddeo

88. “I’m intrigued by the idiocy of trust.”

— Lisa Taddeo

89. “He looked dreamy and broad, and cozy like pizzerias in October. And you thought, This could be forever. We could have a child, and Septembers.”

— Lisa Taddeo

90. “The thing I didn’t expect was that telling her about me would force me to look at myself, at the way I craved the love of men who would never love me. At the way I could not abide women who needed me. At the way I destroyed some while allowing others to destroy me. I felt sick with myself and, at the same time, unburdened. I thought I’d been honest with myself. But I hadn’t. I’d been telling myself ghost stories my whole life.”

— Lisa Taddeo

91. “Why do some straight women need to be beautiful in front of other women? If men were wiped from the planet, how long would that need linger?”

— Lisa Taddeo

92. “The man is nothing. It’s what you think you are missing inside of yourself. I promise that you are missing nothing.”

— Lisa Taddeo

93. “She was raised by women who understood how to live with the X-ray of the man.”

— Lisa Taddeo