Mechelle Ross > Mechelle's Quotes

“Reason #12: Personal shit gives me hives, wheter it's learning about others or giving them things about myself. This is mostly because I hate small talk. Every minute means something. Every hour. Every second. I don't like wasting anything for the sake of goddam normalcy and societal expectations. Fuck society.”
― Eden O'Neill, Savage Little Lies

“Every time I believed Rya owned all of me, she would teach me differently. She would find a part of me I didn’t know I had, and own that, too.”
― India R. Adams, Praying for Thunder

“I like to see you. When you’re not trying to be someone else.”
― Ali Hazelwood, Love, Theoretically

“It’s easier like that, isn’t it? [...] Never showing anyone who you really are. [...] That way if something goes wrong, if someone rejects you, then it’s not about you, is it? When you’re yourself, that’s when you’re exposed. Vulnerable.”
― Ali Hazelwood, Love, Theoretically

“What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. Or makes you resent your pathological inability to set boundaries, one or the two.”
― Ali Hazelwood, Love, Theoretically

“It’s easier like that, isn’t it?”
“What is?”
“Never showing anyone who you really are. That way if something goes wrong, if someone rejects you, then it’s not about you, is it? When you’re yourself, that’s when you’re exposed. Vulnerable. But if you hold back … Losing a game’s always painful, but knowing that you haven’t played your best hand makes it bearable.”
― Ali Hazelwood, Love, Theoretically

“I don’t want to be work. I don’t want you to feel that I’m work.”
“Somewhere along the way your wires got crossed. Your brain decided that you’re not worth people’s time and effort, and that if you ask for anything, they won’t just say no, they’ll also leave you. That’s not how love works, Elsie.”
― Ali Hazelwood, Love, Theoretically

“Have I been doing it all wrong? Maybe instead of getting people to think that I’m worth their time, I should stop giving a shit about them?”
― Ali Hazelwood, Love, Theoretically

“Physics is like sex: it may yield practical results, but often that’s not why we do it.”
― Ali Hazelwood, Love, Theoretically

“I find that people like me better if they don't have to expend emotional energy on me.”
― Ali Hazelwood, Love, Theoretically

“Funny how my physics career and my people-pleasing career started around the same time.”
― Ali Hazelwood, Love, Theoretically

“STEM culture has been a boys' club for so long, I often feel like I can be allowed to play only if I follow the rules men made. And those rules? They downright suck.”
― Ali Hazelwood, The Love Hypothesis

“It's like he's trying to puzzle me out without changing me - and that's impossible. That's not how people are with me.”
― Ali Hazelwood, The Love Hypothesis

“Our children are the wildflowers we planted, who've grown and flourished and thrived, because of us--because we never, ever gave up.”
― Micalea Smeltzer

“We seek beauty, but our understanding of its nature is limited. We find it primarily in easy-to-appreciate human forms. As we grow older and learn more, we journey closer to the truth of beauty. We begin to perceive it more powerfully in minds than in bodies. We stay on our quest, ascending, going higher and higher in our conception of beauty. As we do, our capacity to recognize beauty grows larger. We can take in more. Our eyes adjust to the bright light of the true nature of beauty until, at last, we may be able to behold it - perfect beauty, which is "pure, clean, unmixed, and not infected with human flesh, colors, or morality." Glimpsing to at last, we become part of a bigger sum, something vast and immortal.”
― Chloé Cooper Jones, Easy Beauty

“Beauty is what we're told is beautiful and what we're told becomes the truth.”
― Chloé Cooper Jones, Easy Beauty

“We are meant to understand the scope of the suffering while we also know we can't understand the scope of the suffering. I might shut down. I might feel numb, unable to hold it all at once.”
― Chloé Cooper Jones, Easy Beauty

“But I’m not helpless, I’m struggling. People don’t always recognize the difference.”
― Chloé Cooper Jones, Easy Beauty

“Newness invites the eye and I am always a new thing.”
― Chloé Cooper Jones, Easy Beauty

“My disability is obvious, but its details are unclear, to look at me is to feel information both shown and withheld. These ideas in opposition create cognitive dissonance and this makes people uncomfortable in a way not reducible to prejudice alone.”
― Chloé Cooper Jones, Easy Beauty

“The way words stay, the way sentences stay, the way memories invade my present, the way a stranger looks at me and speaks: shards that become a mirror.”
― Chloé Cooper Jones, Easy Beauty

“I've learned not to share these experiences, especially with able bodies people who can be quick to tell me how I should feel, that I should just ignore it or learn to laugh it off or that I'm being too sensitive and it's not a big deal . . . Often these statements are made with good intentions . . .but they always have the opposite effect, leaving me feeling chastened and misunderstood. It is a deft act of erasure to be told how to process a situation by a person who would never experience it.”
― Chloé Cooper Jones, Easy Beauty

“women plus law plus organizing equals power.”
― Dahlia Lithwick, Lady Justice: Women, the Law, and the Battle to Save America

“I was constantly frustrated by the tension between those who walked away from collapsing institutions and those who remained to try to mitigate the damage. For myself, I felt that the country had betrayed Dr. Ford and her testimony, and there was a connection between the paternalism that led us to pity her, and yet step over her, and the paternalism of a legal system that would increasingly treat all women the same way.”
― Dahlia Lithwick, Lady Justice: Women, the Law, and the Battle to Save America

“Women have come so far in a few decades, and the law, even with its flaws and its anachronisms, has been a quiet, persistent source of order and meaning in a world that feels ever more out of our control. It’s been a source of power beyond just rage. We have a long way to go, the road will be bumpy, and the destination still feels less than clear. But women plus law equals magic; we prove that every day. And bearing witness to what it can and will achieve has been the great privilege of my lifetime. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS When people tell you their stories about Tina Bennett, super agent, believe them.”
― Dahlia Lithwick, Lady Justice: Women, the Law, and the Battle to Save America

“Being told you are believed without consequences being levied is neither justice nor power. And that is the real problem when women's pain is substituted for actual justice. Pain seems to have a sell-by date. Justice does not.”
― Dahlia Lithwick, Lady Justice: Women, the Law, and the Battle to Save America

“The truth about how legal decisions involving women . . . have been framed in the American courtrooms until very recently: by husbands and fathers with good intentions and staggeringly low information”
― Dahlia Lithwick, Lady Justice: Women, the Law, and the Battle to Save America

“Lock her up”—as a prong of Make America Great Again—became a promise to weaponize the machinery of law to silence, threaten, and isolate women. In the end it didn’t even matter whom the pronoun “her” referenced. For crowds who embraced it, it was a generalized promise that after centuries of women’s diligent efforts at bending and shaping and coaxing the law into affording them equal protection and dignity, their gender itself could become a crime.”
― Dahlia Lithwick, Lady Justice: Women, the Law, and the Battle to Save America

“None of our legal and constitutional progress happened in a straight path from light to dark . . . It has been a chiaroscuro journey through a legal system designed chiefly by men, for men, for the principal purpose of advancing the lot of men.”
― Dahlia Lithwick, Lady Justice: Women, the Law, and the Battle to Save America

“Something extraordinary happens when female anger and lawyering meet,”
― Dahlia Lithwick, Lady Justice: Women, the Law, and the Battle to Save America