Nothing but My Body Quotes

“As women we're raised to take tepid two-steps, to doubt, to let the other make the move. And when you are caught with another girl in that dance... How many times have I stepped the same steps, trodden the same tired grooves of my mind, an ouroboros of extreme elation and suffocating uncertainty? How does one get out of this labyrinth? Burn all your romantic novels, cough on the fumes till you spit out the sediment? Bury your pink lingerie in a bed of rock, quell those femme yearnings, become stone?”
― Tilly Lawless, Nothing but My Body

“I want to fuck and be fucked, to be so interested in them that the sex is interrupted by conversation, and then the conversation by sex. Maybe I just want intimacy, the tactile kind. The getting-to-know-you-from-the-inside-out kind. The three-fingers-deep, mouth-tasting-of-you kind. The I'm-hungry-let's-make-toast-at-three-in-the-morning-so-we-can-keep-going kind. The lesbian kind.”
― Tilly Lawless, Nothing but My Body

“I entertain myself with a never-ending daisy chain of crushes to fritter away my time and excess emotion. They pass through my hands as markers of moments in my life, almost indistinguishable from each other but valuable to me for the holding. I like my mind to be crowded with furniture, not empty with echoing footsteps.”
― Tilly Lawless, Nothing but My Body

“I want to wake up tomorrow feeling as good as I do today. I want this day and this drive to never end. I want the laughter to keep going, into the next and the next and the next.
I want to dance in a club. I want to cup someone's face. I want to be texted back as quickly as I text back. I want to lie beside someone for so long that I forget that they're another person and think I'm talking to myself. I want a friend to race ahead of me at a crowded market so I'm left actually talking to myself.
I want free education and health care and housing for everyone everywhere. I want to feel better so I can do better, for the world and everyone in it. I want us to slow if not halt if not reverse the effects of climate change.
I want to read out loud to someone till my mouth gets dry. I want to give a child a piggyback. I want to climb a tree. I want to skip down a pavement scuffing my toes. I want to choke because I've eaten a meal too fast and I want to laugh when I do.
I want to hang a picture. I want to smell a book. I want to cradle a cat as if it's a baby. I want to go into love boldly, like I do everything else. I want to not be incapacitated by it. I want to learn, always. I want to live.”
― Tilly Lawless, Nothing but My Body

“At eighteen, it was a way for me to reclaim that same body from the touch of men on the street, a way I could assert my control over it and block those who made me feel vulnerable within it, when in the real world you can't block, you're so often at the mercy of, scared.”
― Tilly Lawless, Nothing but My Body

“This is a love letter to friendship, I want you to write it on me in ink and then press me against the pages, your personal printing press.”
― Tilly Lawless, Nothing but My Body

“Let me hold your hand so I know you're not a hallucination or a figment of my imagination.”
― Tilly Lawless, Nothing but My Body

“We all sit in silence, soaking up the sun, as the plants do beside us, their little leaves opened up wide in thankfulness for the day. It is a beautiful day; there are beautiful moments in all of this.”
― Tilly Lawless, Nothing but My Body

“I've had to dig the crush from myself, tucked away behind my final rib, deeper than the emotion I felt. Have had to slide my fingers through pulp and innards to pluck it out, (have been) gutted. I want to exhume it from my soul, too, but that's proving harder. How do I wring an intangible thing? I can't even find my soul with my hands, let alone rinse it and hang it out to dry. I want to see the crush drip drip to the ground, just as the water drips from my hair to the pavement now on the walk back to my car, toes purpled with cold.”
― Tilly Lawless, Nothing but My Body

“I want to feel them shake with laughter beside me, tell them they've got sleep in the corner of their eye, tuck their tag in, lie in the grass with my head in their lap, smell the scent of their shampoo, touch their arm to get their attention in a group.”
― Tilly Lawless, Nothing but My Body

“I want my physical presence to match the strength I feel within, want to be carried up high with elation, float like a balloon above this day that I love, these people I feel close to even if I don't know them.”
― Tilly Lawless, Nothing but My Body

“You may think these streets are yours to walk, but they belonged to someone else before: the queers, the hobos, the junkies, the trannies, the prozzies - those streets were theirs before they were yours so be careful, you may find you have to wipe your shoes clean before going into your nice apartment.”
― Tilly Lawless, Nothing but My Body

“I keep crying with laughter and swallowing my hair in the wind and I'm worried about climate change but right now I'm not anxious coz I'm here with you all in my favourite place in the world, but please don't mention the one billion native wildlife dead coz I just want to forget about it all for a few hours or half a day maybe and yeah, we're a world embarrassment coz we've voted in climate change deniers who will do nothing about our horrible rate of carbon emissions even though we are gonna be one of the first countries directly impacted by climate change and I even feel conflicted about having children when the world will probably end but also isn't having children an act of hope and surely if all the people who care about the world stop having kids out of conscience it's just gonna mean the next generation is even less populated with people raised to fight for this earth...”
― Tilly Lawless, Nothing but My Body

“It feels sacrilegious to have his hands upon me, a travesty. I want to cut them off at the wrist, could hang them from the ceiling, an art installation to go among the classic brothel art, dismembered body parts casting shadows on the pastel nudes and yonic oils.”
― Tilly Lawless, Nothing but My Body

“Just as my writing is brought more meaning by the tears cried by those who read it, so we are making something all together, in our bodies and the spaces between us and the moments in which we touch.”
― Tilly Lawless, Nothing but My Body

“This is how women have been valued throughout history, you know. Groupies, muses, wives - they're all secondary, known for their connection to the men whose creativity they inspire and support, not in their own right, reflected glory rather than basking in their own, like their work was overlooked for his.”
― Tilly Lawless, Nothing but My Body

“I could couch my insecurity in the rhetoric of 'eat the rich', but I would rather analyse what it is of theirs that I both hate and want. The stability, the entitlement, the good seat to watch the world burn from?”
― Tilly Lawless, Nothing but My Body

“Respect has a sameness, a conformity to it, but disrespect is varied and alien in its individual manifestation.”
― Tilly Lawless, Nothing but My Body

“Diamond pythons in the roof, bats nesting in my cupboard, satin bowerbirds at the fruit bowl, green tree frogs in the toilet, goanna chasing me on the verandah. That green on green on green. Ferns mark soggy bits of ground, a crossing in the creek, the cool place I like to sit. When it rains the house fills with huntsmans and mole crickets.”
― Tilly Lawless, Nothing but My Body

“Where has my backbone gone? I know: I ripped it out like a string of pearls to give to her in devotion, jag upon jag of bone. And now she gambles with those same bones, knuckle rap on the machine, coin clink down that insatiable crevice. I want her to fill me up like she fills up that machine; instead I cry the milky wet of ovulation down my legs, oiled up and unloved, not even another body in the house to bump against in the hall, or a hug thrown to me as one might throw a bone to a dog as you desert it.”
― Tilly Lawless, Nothing but My Body

“...earlier today I read that 'anxiety' derives from a Latin word meaning 'to narrow'. And I know that this is exactly what my mind has been going through: a narrowing. And I know that when I write my mind feels like an immense playground that I can endlessly swing in, with so much space and wonder. And that when I am anxious I tread the same tired paths that wind smaller and tighter, and I lose all my perspective.”
― Tilly Lawless, Nothing but My Body

“...reaching a relief in their depths that I wish she could reach in mine, wish she would skewer me on her fist like she once did and chant into my loins that she would never let anything happen to me, but her addiction is happening to me and she can't protect me from it because she can't protect herself from it.”
― Tilly Lawless, Nothing but My Body