Emily Witt > Quotes

“I had not chosen to be single but love is rare and it is frequently unreciprocated. Without love I saw no reason to form a permanent attachment to any particular place. Love determined how humans arrayed themselves in space. Because it affixed people into their long-term arrangements, those around me viewed it as an eschatological event, messianic in its totality. My friends expressed a religious belief that it would arrive for me one day, as if love were something the universe owed to each of us, which no human could escape.

I had known love, but having known love I knew how powerless I was to instigate it or ensure its duration. Still, I nurtured my idea of the future, which I thought of as the default denouement of my sexuality, and a destiny rather than a choice. The vision remained suspended, jewel-like in my mind, impervious to the storms of my actual experience, a crystalline point of arrival. But I knew that it did not arrive for everyone, and as I got older I began to worry that it would not arrive for me.”
― Emily Witt, Future Sex: A New Kind of Free Love

“The body, I started to learn, was not a secondary entity. The mind contained very few truths that the body withheld. There was little of import in an encounter between two bodies that would fail to be revealed rather quickly. The epistolary run up to the date only rarely revealed the truth of a man's good humor or introversion, his anxiety or social grace. Until the bodies were introduced, seduction was only provisional.”
― Emily Witt, Future Sex: A New Kind of Free Love

“The beauty of science fiction was that its authors never had to work out the logistics of how we would arrive in the future. The future was presented as a fait accompli, and the difficult work by which a society accepted new social configurations did not have to be explained.”
― Emily Witt, Future Sex

“Magazines often had to draw on the past to recall writers who could command cults of personality, in this case by literally following in the footsteps of bygone intellectuals, in a fury of longing for a time when writing was synonymous with celebrity and style, as opposed to now, when it was associated with obscurity and financial precarity.”
― Emily Witt, Health and Safety: A Breakdown

“There is very little that can be done when a society decides that the only rule of life is to get yours, and that empathy, concern, and worry are for losers and chumps.”
― Emily Witt, Health and Safety: A Breakdown

“The history of the sexual vanguard in America was a long list of people who had been ridiculed, imprisoned, or subjected to violence. So it was annoying to hear the hubris of technologists, while knowing that gadgetry or convenience in telecommunication was the easy kind of futurism, the kind that attracted money. A real disruption or hack was a narration that did not make any sense to us the first time it was told, that would provoke too much repugnance to show in a cell phone ad.”
― Emily Witt, Future Sex

“The images were dazzling but did not exist long enough to be recorded in memory, for that was the point, to cut them off before they would become constrained by the limitations of understanding.”
― Emily Witt, Health and Safety: A Breakdown

“And isn’t a leader only a manifestation of a collective logic?”
― Emily Witt, Health and Safety: A Breakdown

“It was the same old question, whether a declaration of purpose might protect you from failure.”
― Emily Witt, Future Sex: A New Kind of Free Love

“The imaginary home invasion or an influx of people born in other countries was scarier than the real mass shootings that happened on a regular basis, or than the state-sanctioned murder of people by the police?”
― Emily Witt, Health and Safety: A Breakdown

“It was as if we had made something very simple incredibly complicated. Here were these bodies, ready to reproduce, controlled against reproduction, then stimulated for an eventual reproduction that was put on ice. My friends who wanted to prolong their fertility did so, now that they were in their thirties and professionally successful, because circumstances in their lives had not lined up as planned. They had excelled at their jobs. They had nice apartments and enough money to comfortably start a family, but they lacked a domestic companion who would provide the necessary genetic material, lifelong support, and love. They wanted to be the parents they had grown up under, but love couldn't be engineered, and ovaries could.

Hanging over all of this was an idea of choice, an arbitrary linking of goals and outcomes, which reduced structural, economic and technological change to individual decision. "The right to choose"―the right to birth control and abortion services―is different from the idea of choice I mean here. I mean that the baby question justified a fiction that one had to conform one's life to a uniform box by a certain deadline. If the choice were only to have a baby or not, then anybody who wanted a baby and was physically able would simply have one (as many people did), but what I saw with my friends was that it wasn’t actually about the choice of having a baby but of setting up a nuclear family, which unfortunately could not, unlike making a baby, happen more or less by fiat.”
― Emily Witt, Future Sex: A New Kind of Free Love

“He told me that if I was not out of the apartment by the thirtieth of August he would hack me. “I am extremely smart and talented with computers,” he wrote.”
― Emily Witt, Health and Safety: A Breakdown

“Being in love made me happy, and I lost interest in channeling all of my knowledge about nutrition, disease, and medicine into a life of perpetual risk management. The things I gave up during this time included jogging, daily flossing, omega-3 supplements, and the dire sense of professional competition that had given purpose to my solitude and driven my ambition.”
― Emily Witt, Health and Safety: A Breakdown

“Americans loved an act of cheap, self-congratulatory patriotism as a cover for a botched response, for systemic failure.”
― Emily Witt, Health and Safety: A Breakdown

“relive this moment. I think I will forever. You can ruin your own life in an instant, by not paying attention.”
― Emily Witt, Health and Safety: A Breakdown

“She had a beef tongue in the fridge from God knows where and told me how excited she was to prepare it for me for dinner. She would boil it, she said with excitement, then slice it with homemade mayonnaise. I was so lucky to have such a friend.”
― Emily Witt, Health and Safety: A Breakdown

“a mythological Mediterranean childhood playing on rocky beaches in azure waters, breaking the salt crust off a grilled fish, learning from the nuns who took care of her after school to darn socks, and reading Russian fairy tales as a child and Homer as an adolescent in the liceo classico.”
― Emily Witt, Health and Safety: A Breakdown

“people on the coasts always had trouble computing that the people in the middle could live radical lives;”
― Emily Witt, Health and Safety: A Breakdown

“a system of revelation unique to my own limitations of consciousness.”
― Emily Witt, Health and Safety: A Breakdown

“I love my local police," Nelson said. "They keep me safe. They look cute in their unforms. I have a great relationship with all the precincts I've ever been in." She said that MARCH seems to be activated in two scenarios: when a venue is in a rapidly gentirfying neighbourhood, or when it gets on some kind of "naughty list" - "sometimes for good reasons, like violence and drugs, and sometimes when, as in the case with art spaces, there's a cultural misunderstanding.”
― Emily Witt

“If the future was to be defined by a more honest and nuanced sexual culture, one in which sexual diversity was valued, the people with maximalist ambitions were futurists, and they had knowledge unavailable to those who had not considered their extremes. A better sexuality, if such a thing were possible, would be discovered by people who explored the widest range of sexual practice, not those who treated it as resistant to literal representation. I valued the ideas of feminism that spoke of liberating feminine sexuality from masculine ideas of sexiness, but it was as if, having cleaned out the clutter of masculine pornographic language and imagery, the only inoffensive concept left was a spartan white room dotted with patches of sunlight, starched curtains gently blowing from the open floor-to-ceiling windows.”
― Emily Witt, Future Sex: A New Kind of Free Love

“The year I turned thirty a relationship ended. I was very sad but my sadness bored everyone, including me. Having been through such dejection before, I thought I might get out of it quickly. I went on Internet dates but found it difficult to generate sexual desire for strangers. Instead I would run into friends at a party, or in a subway station, men I had thought about before. That fall and winter I had sex with three people, and kissed one or two more. The numbers seemed measured and reasonable to me. All of them were people I had known for some time.

I felt happier in the presence of unmediated humans, but sometimes a nonboyfriend brought with him a dark echo, which lived in my phone. It was a longing with no hope of satisfaction, without a clear object. I stared at rippling ellipses on screens. I forensically analyzed social media photographs. I expressed levity with exclamation points, spelled-out laughs, and emoticons. I artificially delayed my responses. There was a great posturing of busyness, of not having noticed your text until just now. It annoyed me that my phone could hold me hostage to its clichés. My goals were serenity and good humor. I went to all the Christmas parties.”
― Emily Witt, Future Sex: A New Kind of Free Love

“Falling in was one of the greatest risks of adult life, not much discussed—falling in to conspiracy, fanaticism, religion, and embarrassing beliefs, as life continued on and the weight of it broke people left and right.”
― Emily Witt, Health and Safety: A Breakdown

“We're both young Dominicans who represent North Brooklyn, but we're also hardened criminals," Reynoso said. "We're dance outlaws.”
― Emily Witt