It wasn’t really about the engineering of the space, the real battle was about the culture — about changing the hearts and minds of New Yorkers, of changing their minds about who their streets were for. If building roads actually resulted in less traffic, then surely after sixty years of interstate highway construction we would …
Rain is an agony here. In other parts of the world, a downpour will in all likelihood come as a boon for nearly everyone and everything – good for the crops, good for the fauna and the flora, and with an extra splash of romanticism, good for lovers. Not so in Istanbul though. Rain, for …
Continue reading The Bastard of Istanbul – Elif Shafak – Quotes
Saturday was no breeze for Megan, either. She woke up and immediately felt embarrassed. That nasty, awful, hollow endless embarrassment that was becoming her life. Randy was still asleep. She lay there, wishing she could be unconscious again. If she got up and out of bed, what would there be to do? "Yeah, I guess …
Oh no I'm hopeless with visual things, she said And I remember thinking what a strange and sad thing that was to say. Hopeless, with visual things. Someone must have said something to her to make a notion like this stick. I thought of my mum. someone said to my mother once when she was …
I was neither curvaceous nor waif-like. I was normal-sized and normal-faced ( on one side anyway). Did men ever look in the mirror, I wondered, and find themselves wanting in deeply fundamental ways? When they opened a newspaper or watched a film, were they presented with nothing but exceptionally handsome young men, and did this …
Continue reading Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine – Gail Honeyman – Quotes
Simply by being female I was excluded from the lists of potential usurpers, since no woman could ever sit on the Council of the Commanders; so on that front, ironically, I was safe. My life might have been very different. If only I’d looked around me, taken in the wider view. If only I’d packed …
Just because we’ve been hardwired to be self-critical and distracted by meaningless, unattainable goals doesn’t mean we aren’t feminists. It’s one reason we need feminism! We’re allowed to acknowledge, to try to reverse and even laugh at our own cultural brainwashing while we tackle the big stuff. When I first wrote this list, I did …
Continue reading The Guilty Feminist – Deborah Frances-White – Quotes
What, then, has caused this transformation? Were some of our friends always closet authoritarians? Or have the people with whom we clinked glasses in the first minutes of the new millennium somehow changed over the subsequent two decades? There is no single explanation, and I will not offer either a grand theory or a universal …
In twenty-first-century criminal litigation where liberty is on the line, matters of law, not just fact, are decided by volunteers armed with absolutely no formal legal knowledge or training Magistrates, and the quality of justice that their courts engender, are very much The Future. This hangover of thirteenth-century parochial peace-keeping, far from being gently put …
So if you don't fit in; if you feel at odds with the world; if your identity is troubled and frayed; if you feel lost and ashamed, it could be because you have retained the human values you were supposed to have discarded. You are a deviant. Be proud. To seek enlightenment, intellectual or spiritual; …
Continue reading How Did We Get Into This Mess?: Politics, Equality, Nature – George Monbiot- Quotes
