Red Clocks Quotes

“The comparing mind is a despairing mind.”
― Leni Zumas, Red Clocks

“She knew—it was her job as a teacher of history to know—how many horrors are legitimated in public daylight, against the will of most of the people.”
― Leni Zumas, Red Clocks

“Shut up, she tells her monkey mind. Please shut up, you picker of nits, presser of bruises, counter of losses, fearer of failures, collector of grievances future and past.”
― Leni Zumas, Red Clocks

“What does the word “spinster” do that “bachelor” doesn’t do? Why do they carry different associations? These are language acts, people!”
― Leni Zumas, Red Clocks

“The sea does not ask permission or wait for instruction. It doesn’t suffer from not knowing what on earth, exactly, it is meant to do.”
― Leni Zumas, Red Clocks

“Have you ever considered, people, how much time has been stolen from the lives of girls and women due to agonizing over their appearance?'

A few faces smile, uneasy.

Even louder: 'How many minutes, hours, months, even actual years, of their lives do girls and women waste in agonizing? And how many billions of dollars of corporate profit are made as a result?”
― Leni Zumas, Red Clocks

“Over the course of human evolution, did men learn to be attracted to skinny women because they were not visibly pregnant? Did voluptuousness signal that a body was already ensuring the survival of another man's genetic material?”
― Leni Zumas, Red Clocks

“But who cares what the girl looks like, if she is happy? The world will care.”
― Leni Zumas, Red Clocks

“By walking, she tells her students, is how you make the road.”
― Leni Zumas, Red Clocks

“She knew—it was her job as a teacher of history to know—how many horrors are legitimated in public daylight, against the will of most people.”
― Leni Zumas, Red Clocks

“Whatever frees Gin Percival to leave her hair twiggy and wear shapeless sack dresses and smell unwashed—the wife wants that.”
― Leni Zumas, Red Clocks

“But why does she want them, really? Because Susan has them? Because the Salem bookstore manager has them? Because she always vaguely assumed she would have them herself? Or does the desire come from some creaturely place, pre-civilized, some biological throb that floods her bloodways with the message Make more of yourself! To repeat, not to improve.”
― Leni Zumas, Red Clocks

“Shut up, she tells her monkey mind. Please shut up, you picker of nits, presser of bruises, counter of losses, fearer of failures, collector of grievances future and past.”
― Leni Zumas, Red Clocks

“Angry sea,” people say, but to the biographer the ascribing of human feeling to a body so inhumanly itself is wrong. The water heaves up for reasons they don’t have names for.”
― Leni Zumas, Red Clocks

“She wants to stretch her mind wider than 'to have one'.
Wider than 'not to have one'.
To quit shaking her head.
To go to the protest in May.
To do more than to go to a protest.
To be okay with not knowing. [...]
To see what is. And to see what is possible.”
― Leni Zumas, Red Clocks

“People tend to be more comfortable with speech and behavior that does what they already expect it to do. Yours doesn't, and I respect that it doesn't.”
― Leni Zumas, Red Clocks

“At this moment Ro/Miss is taking attendance and doing the bit where she repeats the names of the missing ("Quarles...? Quarles...? Quarles...") in reference to an old movie the daughter hasn't seen.”
― Leni Zumas, Red Clocks

“The Personhood Amendment, the overturning of Roe v. Wade, the calls for abortion providers to face the death penalty - the person she planned to be would care about this mess, would bother to be furious. Too tired to be furious.”
― Leni Zumas, Red Clocks

“You can't say it was rape or incest - nobody cares how it got into you.”
― Leni Zumas, Red Clocks

“Every adopted kid will now reap the rewards of growing up in a two-parent home. Fewer single mothers, says the congressman, will mean fewer criminals and addicts and welfare recipients. Fewer pomegranate farmers. Fewer talk-show hosts. Fewer cure inventors. Fewer presidents of the United States.”
― Leni Zumas, Red Clocks

“Her husband’s hands sit on the wheel at ten and two, a habit that in their courting days shocked the wife: he had played in bands, done drugs, punched his father in the face at age fourteen. Yet he steered - steers - like a grandma.”
― Leni Zumas, Red Clocks

“She was just quietly teaching history when it happened. Woke up one morning to a president-elect she hadn’t voted for. This man thought women who miscarried should pay for funerals for the fetal tissue and thought a lab technician who accidentally dropped an embryo during in vitro transfer was quirky of manslaughter.”
― Leni Zumas, Red Clocks

“Mínevudottír may have felt free; but she was a cog in a land-snatching, resource-sucking, climate-fucking imperialist machine.”
― Leni Zumas, Red Clocks

“Miss said in class she hoped they understood who was to blame for this rib: the monsters in Congress who passed the Personhood Amendment and the walking lobotomies on the Supreme Court who reversed Roe v. Wade. “Two short years ago,” she said—or, actually, shouted—“abortion was legal in this country, but now we have to resort to throwing ourselves down the stairs.”
― Leni Zumas, Red Clocks

“In the stolen valley the whites huddled and crouched, made everything smaller.”
― Leni Zumas, Red Clocks

“In a room for women whose bodies are broken, Eivør Mínervudottír’s biographer waits her turn.”
― Leni Zumas, Red Clocks

“My vadge isn't having a good year”
― Leni Zumas, Red Clocks

“She wants to stretch her mind wider than "to have one".
Wider than "not to have one".
To quit shaking her head.
To go to the protest in May.
To do more than to go to a protest.
To be okay with not knowing. [...]
To see what is. And to see what is possible.”
― Leni Zumas, Red Clocks

“Why does she even want one? How can she tell her students to reject the myth that their happiness depends on having a mate if she believes the same myth about having a child? Why isn't she glad, as Eivor Minervudottir was glad, to be free?”
― Leni Zumas, Red Clocks

“She remembers why John: because everyone can spell and say it. John because his father hates correcting butchered English pronunciations of his own name. The errors of clerks.”
― Leni Zumas, Red Clocks