Colleen > Colleen's Quotes

“We are coached, above all, to prioritize our likability as the surest path to safety and survival.”
― Elise Loehnen, On Our Best Behavior: The Price Women Pay to Be Good

“We have been trained for goodness. Men, meanwhile, have been trained for power.”
― Elise Loehnen, On Our Best Behavior: The Price Women Pay to Be Good

“I consumed it as I always consume things, without thought or comment.”
― Catherine Prasifka, None of This Is Serious

“This is where low self-esteem gets built into the core of the machine. For Aristotle, a person had innate potential and was naturally moving towards perfection. But for the Christians, a person was born in a state of sin and falling towards hell. God, not the individual, was where perfection lay. This meant that a person wanting to become more perfect would have to engage in a constant war with themselves – a war, not with forces out in the world, but with their own soul, their conscience, their mind and thoughts. And because perfection only existed outside the human realm, that struggle would always be hopeless. The Christians had given the Western self a soul, and then begun to torture it.”
― Will Storr, Selfie: How We Became So Self-Obsessed and What It's Doing to Us

“The Ancient Greeks had this idea that being physically beautiful was the same as being ethically good and, likewise, being physically ugly was the same as being ethically bad.’ They had a word for this: kalokagathia, which came from kalos, meaning beautiful, kai, meaning ‘and’, and agathos, meaning ‘good’. ‘This idea, that the bodily form is inherently important for understanding who someone is, is very much still with us,’ he said. The scholar Professor Werner Jaeger has written of kalokagathia’s roots in early Greek aristocracy, describing it as their ‘ideal of human perfection, an ideal towards which the elite of the race was constantly trained’.”
― Will Storr, Selfie: How We Became So Self-Obsessed and What It's Doing to Us

“But the conventions of social media had infiltrated my offline life to the degree that my internal monologue frequently devolved into hashtags and potential captions, each one quippier, more potentially likable, than the last. Who was I doing this for? I wondered. Whose validation did I crave? Was I that desperate to be liked?”
― Sheila Yasmin Marikar, The Goddess Effect

“There are tons of copycats out there, so in a week every Becky With The Long Hair is going to have this exact shot,” she said. “That’s why it’s important to act fast. You always want to be the first ’grammer to capture whatever the next cultural phenomenon is.”
― Jenny Mollen, City of Likes

“The narratives open to us are the ones based on our identities as it is these stories that are market and social media approved. They have a numbing familiarity to them. We second generation immigrants have the privilege of self-actualisation. We make sculptures, direct films, write plays, novels, memoirs and poems about not having a home, of trying to find a home, of being between two types of home, what is home, of how we all feel ugly, of the mixed relationships we enter into with white people, losing our language from a culture we had a tenuous hold of in the first place, we tell the story of being acted upon, we speak from the position of the victim. For an algorithm not”
― Sheena Patel, I'm a Fan

“Questions you cannot answer are usually far better for you than answers you cannot question.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century

“All of our waste which we dumped on her and which she absorbed. And all of our beauty, which was hers first and which she gave to us. All of us--all who knew her--felt so wholesome after we cleaned ourselves on her. We were so beautiful when we stood astride her ugliness. Her simplicity decorated us, her guilt sanctified us, her pain made us glow with health, her awkwardness made us think we had a sense of humor. Her inarticulateness made us believe we were eloquent. Her poverty kept us generous. Even her waking dreams we used--to silence our own nightmares. And she let us, and thereby deserved our contempt. We honed our egos on her, padded our characters with her frailty, and yawned in the fantasy of our strength.

And fantasy it was, for we were not strong, only aggressive; we were not free, merely licensed; we were not compassionate, we were polite; not good, but well behaved. We courted death in order to call ourselves brave, and hid like thieves from life. We substituted good grammar for intellect; we switched habits to simulate maturity; we rearranged lies and called it truth, seeing in the new pattern of an old idea the Revelation and the Word.”
― Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye

“You looked at them and wondered why they were so ugly; you looked closely and could not find the source. Then you realized that it came from conviction, their conviction. It was as though some mysterious all-knowing master had given each one a cloak of ugliness to wear, and they had each accepted it without question.”
― Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye

“Just winging it. My motto for life and eyeliner.” I laughed to myself. She really did have the most corny captions.”
― Jenny Mollen, City of Likes

“You mean poor?” I laughed in disbelief. “Speaking of which… maybe if I were actually getting paid for the work I’m doing here, the class divide wouldn’t be so big.” “It’s coming,” Vigo promised. “For real, when am I getting paid?”
― Jenny Mollen, City of Likes

“I wish I could change everything about myself but it's just—it's too late to do anything, that's the problem. It's all so fucked up, and I just don't who I am anymore, you know? Like, who is this person who made all these choices that I just have to live with? I look back at that person and I hate her, I hate her so much for what she did to me, that person is like my nemesis, my worst enemy, but the problem is, that person is me.”
― Kristen Roupenian, You Know You Want This: Cat Person and Other Stories

“He called me dark, twisted, and mean.” “How sweet. He’s in love.”
― Mona Awad, Bunny

“If our fate was now a personal matter, that meant turning the pursuit of perfection inwards. New thinkers, the Cynics and the Stoics, preached that human civilization was corrupt and that happiness lay in refusing its old lures. The perfect self was not one of fame and glory, after all, but one of pious virtue. The righteous man lived humbly and obediently. He trained himself to resist temptation. In order to protect our soul from the evil that was everywhere, we had to purge ourselves of the sinful excesses of our youth and become pure. And so we got down on our knees and we crossed ourselves and prayed.”
― Will Storr, Selfie: How We Became So Self-Obsessed and What It's Doing to Us

“We've found this relationship between social perfectionism and suicidality in all populations where we've done the work, including among the disadvantaged and the affluent." What's not yet known is why. "Our hypothesis is that social perfectionists are much more sensitive to signals of failure in the environment.”
― Will Storr, Selfie: How the West Became Self-Obsessed

“Imagine a world so small that your ego can fill all of it.”
― Samantha Allen, Patricia Wants to Cuddle

“Casey thought they looked like a psychotic book club or something”
― Samantha Allen, Patricia Wants to Cuddle

“Though, in the grand scheme of things, selling tummy tea and gummy vitamins isn’t that much more of a scam than running HR sensitivity trainings. Maybe she can finally go to that hotel in Santorini she’s always wanted to stay in—the one with the hot tubs built into the hillside.”
― Samantha Allen, Patricia Wants to Cuddle

“Is this all there is waiting for Renee? Love, maybe, and then decay? Her body catching up with the rot in her brain?”
― Samantha Allen, Patricia Wants to Cuddle

“Desire can be such a heady substitute for self-confidence. But she’s trying to stop searching for herself in the eyes of others—especially the dead eyes of a greasy-haired gym junkie.”
― Samantha Allen, Patricia Wants to Cuddle

“This is not where she pictured herself at this point in life, but then again, she had always had trouble even envisioning being alive past thirty. All the possibilities she had seen in her own circles—getting married, getting divorced, raising kids, aspirational suburban grilling—each of them felt tragic in their own right, all equally dead ends. Something inside of her had always felt like it was decaying, doomed, not long for this world. But telling that to anyone would make her feel crazy.”
― Samantha Allen, Patricia Wants to Cuddle

“We are not pawns in a battle between the dark and the light. We are human, a bridge between matter and spirit; we can find the middle and hold the line. We can sense that we are on a seesaw that’s bending out of control and that unless each of us comes into balance we will struggle to survive.”
― Elise Loehnen, On Our Best Behavior: The Price Women Pay to Be Good

“Women who have succeeded too well at becoming visible have always been penalized vigilantly and forcefully, and turned into spectacles.”
― Elise Loehnen, On Our Best Behavior: The Price Women Pay to Be Good

“All of these people are saying more or less the same thing, that it's okay to panic and equally okay to try and pretend things are normal, depending on what works for individual people, but they're doing a good job of acting like they're on different sides. There's nothing at the centre, no one telling me what it is I should be panicking about, only that it's okay to do so.”
― Catherine Prasifka, None of This Is Serious

“Modern life is a fiction; it feels like nothing ever changes, but when you examine its fabric, its zeros and ones, it's falling apart. We've just collectively decided to believe that it's not.”
― Catherine Prasifka, None of This Is Serious

“There is still a real life to be lived, there are still real things to be done.”
― Patricia Lockwood, No One Is Talking About This

“The more you give up who you are to be liked by other people, it’s a formula for chipping away at your soul. You become a product of what everyone else wants, and not who you’re supposed to be.”
― Sarah Frier, No Filter: The Inside Story of Instagram

“They are homogeneously beautiful, as if airlifted from a movie set about popular high school girls. They are still in character, perhaps, since they don’t acknowledge or even notice me.”
― Ling Ling Huang, Natural Beauty