The Debutante and Other Stories – Leonora Carrington – Quotes

From introduction by Sheila Heti: How many writers today would dare to write as Carrington does? Everyone tries to make so much sense - not only to themselves, but to others, especially. I don't know if she was trying to make sense also to her Surrealist friends, but I know that sense was low on …

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Streetfight. Handbook for an Urban Revolution – Janette Sadik-Khan, Seth Solomonow – Quotes

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 …

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Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine – Gail Honeyman – Quotes

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 …

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Border: A Journey to the Edge of Europe – Kapka Kassabova – Quotes

The weeks went by in the Village in the Valley, and I felt dark and heavy like the plums in the abandoned gardens. The sizzle of insects intensified with the fragrant decay of summer. I didn’t even have the motivation to take myself to the beach anymore. My sense of impasse was mixed with languor, …

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The Guilty Feminist – Deborah Frances-White – Quotes

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 …

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Twilight of Democracy: The Failure of Politics and The Parting of Friends – Anne Applebaum – 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 …

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