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
Now, just thinking about it, I felt like whipping the air of the pinewood harder and harder, like a child, to evoke the spirits, perhaps to chase them away, and the more energy I put into it, the sharper the whistle became. I burst into laughter, alone, seeing myself like that, a thirty-eight-yar-old woman in …
Continue reading The Days of Abandonment – Elena Ferrante – Quotes
In a city swollen by refugees but still mostly at peace, or at least not openly at war, a young man met a young woman in a classroom and did not speak to her. [...] with cities as with life, for one moment we are pottering about our errands as usual and the next we …
[...] ageing is nothing to be ashamed of especially when the entire human race is in it together although sometimes it seems that she alone among her friends wants to celebrate getting older because it's such a privilege not to die prematurely (on living in a squat): the Marxists demanded they set up a Central …
Continue reading Girl, Woman, Other – Bernardine Evaristo – Quotes
Our final moments in this life aren't generally an appropriate time for clear-eyed reflection; indeed, they always find us at our most sentimental. A silent funeral is a funeral stripped of all its awe, Bolbol thought. Rites and rituals meant nothing now. For the first time, everyone was truly equal in death. [...]it allowed him …
Continue reading Death is Hard Work – Khaled Khalifa – Quotes
I remember the morning, long ago, hen the landlord called. [...]he said that of course we were aware that our lease was up? I said well, no, we hadn't really known that our lease was up. So he said well, he supposed that we hadn't looked at the lease recently and I (wondering if that …
Continue reading Life Among the Savages – Shirley Jackson – Quotes
Japhy and I were kind of outlandish-looking on the campus in our old clothes in fact Japhy was considered an eccentric around the campus, which is the usual thing got campuses and college people to think whenever a real man appears on the scene - colleges being nothing but grooming schools for the middle-class non-identity …
