Key Insights & Memorable Quotes
Below are the most popular and impactful highlights and quotes from She's Not Sorry:
“The truth is that social media is an optical illusion. It’s an unreality, it’s the very deliberate version of people’s lives that they want you to see.”
“There is no end to the number of rules women are supposed to follow at night regarding their safety—be observant, stay off your phone, adjust your routine so you don’t always take the same route, wear comfortable shoes that you can run in and carry mace or a Swiss army knife. Or better yet, don’t walk alone at night, especially if you’ve been drinking, because alcohol lowers your awareness and your reaction time and makes you an easy target—and yet men can do any damn thing they’d like and it’s fine.”
“As nurses, we’re supposed to compartmentalize, to be detached, to mentally separate our professional lives from our personal lives, like sorting medication into a pill sorter, clearly divided with thick plastic tabs. We were taught this in nursing school, though it’s not that easy and it’s not something that can be taught—to care for and about our patients, but to not let ourselves get emotionally attached because attachment, they say, leads to burnout, which causes nurses to leave an already hemorrhaging profession. It’s hard because as nurses, it’s in our nature to be compassionate, and these two things—detachment and compassion—are at odds with one another.”
“Who is this woman who’s been living in my home, who I’ve been telling my secrets to?”
“for more reasons than one.”
“There is a shortage of nurses in the workforce these days. Burnout from the pandemic is real. In the last few years, it’s led many to rethink their career choice and to leave the profession en masse, which puts even more pressure on the rest of us. While the number of critical care nurses has been depleted, the number of patients continues to grow. They still come, despite the fact that we don’t always have enough room or resources to care for them as well as we should. It’s a known fact that inadequate nursing staff is directly aligned to patient mortality. The fewer nurses we have, the more responsibilities we have. We’re spread thin. We’re physically exhausted and emotionally drained. As a result, mistakes happen. It’s not necessarily due to bad doctors and nurses, but systematic health-care problems.”
“being alone and lonely was better than feeling neglected and ignored.”
“social media is an optical illusion. It’s an unreality, it’s the very deliberate version of people’s lives that they want you to see.”
“It’s hard because as nurses, it’s in our nature to be compassionate, and these two things—detachment and compassion—are at odds with one another.”
“As nurses, we’re supposed to compartmentalize, to be detached, to mentally separate our professional lives from our personal lives, like sorting medication into a pill sorter, clearly divided with thick plastic tabs.”
“That’s her,” she says, pointing at the photo. “That’s Caitlin. I wanted you to know what she looks like,” she says. I know, of course, what she looks like. I can see that for myself, but what she means is that she wants me to see what she looks like without all the gauze and tubes, which mask half her face while the rest is swollen and bruised.”
“I worry about Luke sometimes and the way he describes his marriage to Penelope. I worry she emasculates him, that she makes him get down on himself because he doesn’t have a six-figure salary and can’t provide for her in the way another man could, in the way Luke wishes he could.”
“Luke is almost always upbeat. He’s one of only two male nurses on staff, which is typical—only something like 12 or 14 percent of nurses are men—though, contrary to popular belief, he’s not gay. You don’t have to be gay to be a male nurse. He’s married to a woman, though he was single for so long that people came to their own conclusions about him. His wife is gorgeous too, like a goddess.”
