Kaylie > Kaylie's Quotes

“What if she doesn't worry about her body and eats enough for all the growing she has to do? She might rip her stockings and slam-dance on a forged ID to the Pogues, and walk home barefoot, holding her shoes, alone at dawn; she might baby-sit in a battered-women's shelter one night a month; she might skateboard down Lombard Street with its seven hairpin turns, or fall in love with her best friend and do something about it, or lose herself for hours gazing into test tubes with her hair a mess, or climb a promontory with the girls and get drunk at the top, or sit down when the Pledge of Allegiance says stand, or hop a freight train, or take lovers without telling her last name, or run away to sea. She might revel in all the freedoms that seem so trivial to those who could take them for granted; she might dream seriously the dreams that seem to obvious to those who grew up with them really available. Who knows what she would do? Who knows what it would feel like?”
― Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth

“Or are "being" and "having" thoroughly inaccurate verbs in the twisted skein of desire, where having someone's body to touch and being that someone we're longing to touch are one and the same, just opposite banks on a river that passes from us to them, back to us and over to them again in this perpetual circuit where the chambers of the heart, like the trapdoors of desire, and the wormholes of time, and the false-bottomed drawer we call identity share a beguiling logic according to which the shortest distance between real life and the life unlived, between who we are and what we want, is a twisted staircase designed with the impish cruelty of M. C. Escher.”
― André Aciman, Call Me by Your Name

“Come morning I found the day as I have found every other day--without relief or explanation.”
― Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves

“And there is one sure thing about the fall of gods: they do not fall a little; they crash and shatter or sink deeply into green muck. It is a tedious job to build them up again; they never quite shine. And the child's world in never quite whole again. It is an aching kind of growing.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“All that is gold does not glitter,
Not all those who wander are lost;
The old that is strong does not wither,
Deep roots are not reached by the frost.

From the ashes a fire shall be woken,
A light from the shadows shall spring;
Renewed shall be blade that was broken,
The crownless again shall be king.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

“The grey-rain curtain turned all to silver glass and was rolled back, and he beheld white shores and beyond them a far green country under a swift sunrise.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Return of the King

“Keep your heart infinitesimally small, and sorrow will never spy it...”
― Emma Donoghue

“We're all in this together and we don't have much time.”
― Richard Aitken

“Human Beings Only an Aggregate of Cells and the Brain Only a Wonderful Machine, Says Wizard of Electricity”
― Thomas Edison

“I think it is best to know what you are and make peace with it.”
― Sarah McCarry

“Existential nausea comes from feeling trapped. It is an affect state resulting from the feeling that the future has only bad options.”
― Kim Stanley Robinson

“When you discover that you are living in a fantasy that cannot endure, a fantasy that will destroy your world, and your children, what do you do?

People said things like, Fuck it, or Fuck the future. They said things like, The day is warm, or This meal is excellent, or Let's go to the lake and swim.”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, Aurora

“A human being is a part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feeling as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.”
― Albert Einstein

“No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it.”
― Albert Einstein

“I would have girls regard themselves not as adjectives but as nouns.”
― Elizabeth Cady Stanton

“Khatun (queen) is one of the most authoritative and magnificent words in the Mongolian language. It conveys regality, stateliness, and great strength. If something resists breaking no matter how much pressure is applied, it is described as khatun. The word can form part of a boy’s or girl’s names, signifying power and firmness combined with beauty and grace. Because of the admitted qualities of khatun, men have often borne names such as Khatun Temur, literally ‘Queen Iron’, and Khatun Baatar, 'Queen Hero’.”
― Jack Weatherford

“Damaged people are dangerous. They know they can survive.”
― Josephine Hart, Damage

“...Fan fiction is a way of the culture repairing the damage done in a system where contemporary myths are owned by corporations instead of owned by the folk.”
― Henry Jenkins

“I think,” Hoa says slowly, “that if you love someone, you don’t get to choose how they love you back.”
― N.K. Jemisin, The Stone Sky

“Don’t be patient. Don’t ever be. This is the way a new world begins.”
― N.K. Jemisin, The Stone Sky

“Coming of queer age in the 1990s, to love queers was to love damage. To love damage was a path to loving yourself. ...Queers do not come out of the minefield of homophobia without scars. We do not live through out families' rejection of us, our stunted life options, the violence we've faced, the ways in which we've violated ourselves for survival, our harmful coping mechanisms, our lifesaving delusions, the altered brain chemistry we have sustained as a result of this, the low income and survival states we've endured as a result of society's loathing, unharmed. Whatever of theses wounds I didn't experience firsthand, my lovers did, and so I say that, for a time, it was not possible to have queer love that was not ins some way damaged or defined by damage sustained, even as it desperately fought through that damage to access, hopefully, increasingly frequent moments of sustaining, lifesaving love, true love, and loyalty, and electric sex.”
― Michelle Tea, Against Memoir: Complaints, Confessions & Criticisms

“No one needs to see us for us to exist. No one needs to love us for us to exist. The sky is filled with light.

The world is full of wonders.”
― Maria Dahvana Headley, The Mere Wife

“Stories are social actions, embedded in social worlds.”
― Ken Plummer

“Anger is not a sustainable emotion in and of itself. It has to be transformed into a deep love for the possibility of who we can be.”
― Alicia Garza

“Unlearning the colonialism I was taught, the stories I've been told and I've told myself, is a daily practice, like learning a new language. You learn it by watching films, listening to the radio, reading books. Your ear gets attuned to it. You pick up the vocabulary, learn the system's grammar and mechanics. From there, you can understand and deconstruct it. Sure, learning a language is a solo task, but it helps to have conversation partners.”
― Matt Ortile, The Groom Will Keep His Name: And Other Vows I've Made About Race, Resistance, and Romance

“How shall I put it? Beauty-yes, beauty is like a decayed tooth. It rubs against one's tongue, it hangs there, hurting one, insisting on its own existence, finally it gets so that one cannot stand the pain and one goes to the dentist to have the tooth extracted, Then, as one looks at the small, dirty, brown, blood-stained tooth lying in one's hand, one's thoughts are likely to be as follows: ‘Is this it? Is this all it was? That thing which caused me so much pain, which made me constantly fret about its existence, which was stubbornly rooted within me, is now merely a dead object. But is this thing really the,same as that thing? If this originally belonged to my outer existence, why-through what sort of providence-did it become attached to my inner existence and succeed in causing me so much pain? What was the basis of this creature's existence? Was the basis within me? Or was it within this creature itself? Yet this creature which has been pulled out of my mouth and which now lies in my hand is something utterly different. Surely it cannot be that?”
― Yukio Mishima, The Temple of the Golden Pavilion