All my life I have overheard, all my life I have listened to what people will let slip when they think you are part of their we. A are so powerful. It is the most corrupt and formidable institution on earth. Its hands are full of the crispest and most persuasive currency. Its mouth is full of received, repeating language. The close its ranks to protect the space inside it, where the air is different. It does not protect people. It protects its own shape.

— Patricia Lockwood

As they perform this ritual, I almost have to turn away, thinking again what a boomeranging, out-of-body experience it is to watch a religious childhood from the outside, when before I was in the very marrow of it.

— Patricia Lockwood

He clenched his small fist, bellowed his rage to the heavens, and resolved to never again recognize the authority of any man on earth.

— Patricia Lockwood

I fucking eat silence of crickets for fun. I got life afterlife and a name like Baby. Every time I try to cry a tear anew kitten head grows out of me.

— Patricia Lockwood

I know all women are supposed to be strong enough now to strangle presidents and patriarchies between their powerful thighs, but it doesn't work that way. Many of us were actually affected, by male systems and male anger, in ways we cannot always articulate or overcome. Sometimes, when the ceiling seems especially low and the past especially close, I think to myself, I did not make it out. I am still there in that place of diminishment, where that voice an octave deeper than mine is telling me what I am.

— Patricia Lockwood

I'm not interested in heaven unless my anger gets to go there too. I'm not interested in a happy eternity unless I get to spend an eternity on anger first. Let me speak for the meek and say that we don't want the earth, if that's where all the bodies are buried. If we are resurrected at the end of the world, I want us to assemble with a military click, I want us to come together as an army against what happened to us here. I want us to bring down the enemy of our suffering once and for all, and I want us to loot the pockets, and I want us to take baths in the blood.

— Patricia Lockwood

In a field where else you found a stack of revealing nature photographs, of supernode nature photographs, split beaver of course nature photographs, photographs full of 70s bush, nature taking come from every man from miles around, nature with come back to me just dripping from her lips. The stack came up to your eye, you saw: nature is big into blood play, nature is into extreme age play, nature does wild interracial, nature she wants you to pee in her mouth, natural dead and nature is sleeping and still nature is on all fours, a horse it fucks nature to death up in Oregon, nature is hot young amateur redheads, the foxes are all in their holes for the night, nature is hot old used-up cougars, nature makes gaping fake-agony faces, nature is consensual dad-on-daughter, nature is completely obsessed with twins, nature doing specialty and nature doing niche, exotic females they line up to drip for you, nature getting paddled as Haidas you can paddle her, oh a whitewater rapid with her assign the air, high snowy tail on display just everywhere.

— Patricia Lockwood

I simply ate a fish-head, but fish-heads won't fill me now. Your attention is a fish-head, so throw it back into my new body, back into the body climbing the stairs.

— Patricia Lockwood

My father despises cats. He believes them to be Democrats. He considers them to be little mean Hillary Clinton covered all over with feminist leg fur. Cats would have abortions, if given half a chance. Cats would have abortions for fun. Consequently, our own soft sinner, a soulful snowshoe named Alice, will stay shut in the bedroom upstairs, padding back and forth on cashmere paws, campaigning for equal pay, educating me about my reproductive system, and generally plotting the downfall of all men.

— Patricia Lockwood

See men for miles around give nature what she needs, rivers and rivers and rivers of it. You exhale with perfect happiness. Nature turned you down in high school. Now you can come in her eye.

— Patricia Lockwood