The Water Cure Quotes

“Thinking yourself uniquely terrible is its own form of narcissism.”
― Sophie Mackintosh, The Water Cure

“Refrain of the man, universal: This is not my fault!
See also: I absolve myself of responsibility.
And: I never said that. You can't take the actions of my body as words.”
― Sophie Mackintosh, The Water Cure

“I invite the confessionals of men. I am not a stranger to them. Absorbing the guilt and the sorrow is something the world expects of women.”
― Sophie Mackintosh, The Water Cure

“There is a fluidity to his movements, despite his size, that tells me he has never had to justify his existence, has never had to fold himself into a hidden thing, and I wonder what that must be like, to know that your body is irreproachable.”
― Sophie Mackintosh, The Water Cure

“Love...also taught me that loss is a thing that builds around you. That what feels like safety is often just absence of current harm, and those two things are not the same.”
― Sophie Mackintosh, The Water Cure

“I know that without being touched I will die. I have known it for some time. It has always felt like I need more touch than the others anyway, my hands brushing over their shoulders or the tops of their heads as they shy away, because nobody is assigned to me. I am not anybody’s loved-most, have not been for some time. I have gone days, weeks, without touch and when that happens I can feel my skin thinning, I have to lay my body against grass and velvet and the corner of the sofa and rub my hands and elbows and thighs against anything until they are raw.”
― Sophie Mackintosh, The Water Cure

“Trauma is a toxin that hooks into our hair and organs and blood and becomes part of us, the way heavy metals do, our bodies nothing more than a layering of flesh around everything ingested and experienced.”
― Sophie Mackintosh, The Water Cure

“It's the men who don't even know themselves that wish you harm - those are the most dangerous ones. They will have you cower in the name of love, and feel sentimental about it. They're the ones who hate women the most.”
― Sophie Mackintosh, The Water Cure

“If we were to spit at them, they would spit back harder. We expected that - we were prepared for it even. What we didn't expect was their growing outrage that we even dared to have moisture in our mouths. Then outrage that we had mouths at all. They would have liked us all dead, I know that now.”
― Sophie Mackintosh, The Water Cure

“Step always with caution. The body is the purest sort of alarm. If something feels wrong, it probably is.”
― Sophie Mackintosh, The Water Cure

“It is Sky who saves us. It will always be a woman who saves us, we know that now. The protections of men are only ever flimsy and self-serving.”
― Sophie Mackintosh, The Water Cure

“Do not enter. Viewed from another angle, Do not leave.”
― Sophie Mackintosh, The Water Cure

“The forest looms. It is dark in here, dark where I belong, with the wolves and the snakes and the other loveless creatures.”
― Sophie Mackintosh, The Water Cure

“I would take my strange and incapable heart out of my chest if I could, display it, absolve myself of responsibility.”
― Sophie Mackintosh, The Water Cure

“There is a violence to our eulogizing. We are making something of you that you never consented to. We are turning you into something else: a man finally overcome by the world. I know you would not want to be remembered that way. Thinking about you is akin to dragging your bloated ghost to shore. And why would we want to keep bringing that back?”
― Sophie Mackintosh, The Water Cure

“Every time I think "I am very lonely," it becomes bleaker and more true. You can think things into being. You can dwell them up from the ground.”
― Sophie Mackintosh, The Water Cure

“Part of what made the old world so terrible, so prone to destruction, was a total lack of preparation for the personal energies often called feelings. Mother told us about these kinds of energies. Especially dangerous for women, our bodies already so vulnerable in ways that the bodies of men are not. It was a wonder that there were still safe places, islands like ours where women can be healthful and whole.”
― Sophie Mackintosh, The Water Cure

“Sometimes she was my enemy and sometimes she was just my mother, an enemy in a different way.”
― Sophie Mackintosh, The Water Cure

“It's important, the knowledge that things could always be worse. Imagining them gone makes the edges of my love sharper.”
― Sophie Mackintosh, The Water Cure

“It also taught me that loss is a thing that builds around you. That what feels like safety is often just absence of current harm, and those two things are not the same.”
― Sophie Mackintosh, The Water Cure

“She was just like every other woman. Eager and tender-hearted. That knot of grief in her chest begging to be undone.”
― Sophie Mackintosh, The Water Cure

“Crying lays you low and vulnerable, racks your body. If water is the cure for what ails us, the water that comes from our own faces and hearts is the wrong sort. It has absorbed our pain and is dangerous to let loose.”
― Sophie Mackintosh, The Water Cure

“It used to bother me that we would leave little trace, but now I have never been more glad about anything. I will wake up in the empty mornings with the absence of you, and I will think, Glad, glad, glad, and it will ring like a bell.”
― Sophie Mackintosh, The Water Cure

“The world has not been kind to him, I can tell, yet he loves it anyway. It is a man's place. His survival is implicit, a survival taken for granted.”
― Sophie Mackintosh, The Water Cure

“Everybody knew and nobody helped. It was the secret that we were all choking on. Even my mother, my sisters, my aunt's. They passed it around. They said, with their eyes, why should you escape it? What makes you better than us? Can't you see our hearts have been bleeding for years?”
― Sophie Mackintosh, The Water Cure

“Love always asks you to sacrifice something, I know that now.”
― Sophie Mackintosh, The Water Cure

“Absorbing the guilt and the sorrow is something the world expects of women.”
― Sophie Mackintosh, The Water Cure

“What must it be like, to live in a world that wants to kill you? Where every breath is an affront?”
― Sophie Mackintosh, The Water Cure

“One day I looked at my husband and I thought, Would you knock them down? Would you stand up with your arms raised if they came for me? Coming for me was a thing I considered often, though the 'they' was hazy, it changed all the time. Once I had thought this bad thought, I couldn't stop thinking about it. I thought it when he was asleep and I was awake. No, I realized one day. He would lie down and let them.”
― Sophie Mackintosh, The Water Cure

“The real trick is how and why we continue surviving at all.”
― Sophie Mackintosh, The Water Cure