Top 35 Sara Pascoe Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “What I find most troubling is the recent expectation for sudden weight loss after pregnancy. It’s perverse that the finest compliment given to a woman who has just made a person is that she looks like she hasn’t.”

— Sara Pascoe

2. “Birds are monogamous because their young require the input of two parents. This isn’t romance, it’s evolutionary necessity.”

— Sara Pascoe

3. “If you would like some chat to ruin any party’s vibe, research dowry deaths and bride burning. Thousands of women are murdered every year because the father who ‘owns’ them does not pay enough to their new keeper.”

— Sara Pascoe

4. “You cannot give somebody permission to force you to do things, any more than you can allow yourself to be overpowered.”

— Sara Pascoe

5. “Any time you see the word ‘detox’ someone is trying to sell you absolute waste-of-time crap. Your.”

— Sara Pascoe

6. “I can’t imagine a young man being told not to dress a certain way because a homosexual person might find them sexy. In those instances, the target of the attraction would never be blamed. Responsibility would rest with the feeler of feelings.”

— Sara Pascoe

7. “When studies examining gender differences don’t reflect my experience I sigh to myself, ‘Must be a man then, what with my masculine reaction,’ rather than remembering that it’s only ever a small sample being extrapolated from.”

— Sara Pascoe

8. “Why are boys’ feelings a girl’s responsibility? This is treating the male response as unavoidable: the problem is schoolgirls’ hemlines.”

— Sara Pascoe

9. “She peeped through one of the small holes in the outer wall rising up from the walkway. The world on the outside was nothing but countryside now. Dirt roads, like chocolate ribbons, disappeared into woods or green fields in the distance.”

— Sara Pascoe

10. “But I can remember how grown-up I felt then, and earlier, since about nine. Because we age one way, in one direction, every age we are is the most grown-up we’ve ever been.”

— Sara Pascoe

11. “I have money now, I never have to speak to anyone I don’t want to, and I love it. What money has bought me is freedom, and I never forget it.”

— Sara Pascoe

12. “So you’re unique and unusual, well done, now pop off and eat your banana.”

— Sara Pascoe

13. “Raya knew this type of girl – they never liked her. Usually they’d make fun of her, behind her back, but loud enough for her to hear. She was too alternative, too poor and too cynical – the foster kid – to be of any interest to these social climbers.”

— Sara Pascoe

14. “There’s a range of pills that claim to help men create more semen. Why? WHY? I stared at my computer; why would anyone want more of the sticky annoying bit?”

— Sara Pascoe

15. “The most important lesson of adulthood might be that just because you feel something, that doesn’t mean someone intended you to feel it. That applies to both the women in LinkedIn photos and the men making comments.”

— Sara Pascoe

16. “Even though it’s only a minority of men who are violent or predatory, I don’t know if men realise that girls are trained our entire lives to minimise the danger from you – and blamed if we don’t.”

— Sara Pascoe

17. “We’re descended from the watching-his-every-move, spreading-rumours-that-he’s-impotent, accusing-him-of-flirting-with-his-mum, jealous bitches.”

— Sara Pascoe

18. “The summer sun bowing out threw slashes of colour between the buildings. London looked big, empty, and lonely. She stood in the doorway, like a cat trying to make up its mind.”

— Sara Pascoe

19. “Like water around rocks, people streamed around them as though this sort of interaction, noisy and involving foreigners, was nothing unusual.”

— Sara Pascoe

20. “These ‘historical’ texts made us angry because they didn’t feel like a reflection of some other time, but of our own.”

— Sara Pascoe

21. “But maybe all of us understanding more about why bad things happen can help us stop them?”

— Sara Pascoe

22. “I have decided it’s my mind that’s woman. It’s my narrator. It’s my relationship to myself, and oddly, nothing at all to do with my body.”

— Sara Pascoe

23. “Oscar looked up from his plate, and if a cat could laugh, he would have. ‘Boy, that’s ugly, even for a jinn. Looks like a cross between a rat, a frog and a bottlebrush.”

— Sara Pascoe

24. “And she was right. No matter how they tried, the two humans, with the cat but without the microchip, couldn’t connect to headquarters. Raya heard a loud popping sound in her mind, like a huge rubber band being snapped, like a glider plane released from a Piper Cub.”

— Sara Pascoe

25. “There is no fate, there are no souls or stars crossing or ‘The Ones’. Our powerful emotion is an inbuilt survival tactic. It’s a primordial glue, sticking us together to continue the species.”

— Sara Pascoe

26. “Normal’ is a concept formed by averages but it changes with education and tolerance.”

— Sara Pascoe

27. “When looking for evolutionary explanations it can seem like we’re seeking to excuse behaviour, to justify it. But I do not think there is any excuse or justification. Evolutionary pressures are not a defence.”

— Sara Pascoe

28. “Then Raya saw Rebecca West, the fourteen-year-old who only saved her own life by testifying against her mother, and then she saw her own face reflected in these girls – a swirl of chance, and life and sorrow.”

— Sara Pascoe

29. “Do you think it is better to be punched in the face by someone you like?”

— Sara Pascoe

30. “It’s perverse that the finest compliment given to a woman who has just made a person is that she looks like she hasn’t.”

— Sara Pascoe

31. “I guess this combination of ‘birth is the most natural thing in the world’ and ‘birth is agonising and dangerous and can kill everyone involved’ is difficult for us to absorb.”

— Sara Pascoe

32. “On the end of my bed. He’s short, round and bald, with a tartan loin cloth, and what looks like a spout on the top of his head,’ Bryony said. ‘You flatter me,’ came the snide male voice. ‘But it’s a valve.”

— Sara Pascoe

33. “I am sorry for men because our culture tells them to introduce themselves to women who in the vast, vast majority don’t want to meet them.”

— Sara Pascoe

34. “Love is described like GOD.”

— Sara Pascoe

35. “Fear and arousal is not just a great band name, they predispose our deepest, most subconscious emotional needs.”

— Sara Pascoe

36. “The sunset bled into the edges of the village. Smoke curled out of the cottage chimney like a crooked finger.”

— Sara Pascoe