Alyssa > Alyssa's Quotes

“It’s hard to be told to lighten up because if you lighten up any more, you’re going to float the fuck away.”
― Roxane Gay, Bad Feminist: Essays

“I believe feminism is grounded in supporting the choices of women even if we wouldn’t make certain choices for ourselves.”
― Roxane Gay, Bad Feminist: Essays

“I would rather be a bad feminist than no feminist at all.”
― Roxane Gay, Bad Feminist

“When feminism falls short of our expectations, we decide the problem is with feminism rather than with the flawed people who act in the name of the movement.”
― Roxane Gay, Bad Feminist: Essays

“Some women being empowered does not prove the patriarchy is dead. It proves that some of us are lucky.”
― Roxane Gay, Bad Feminist

“In truth, feminism is flawed because it is a movement powered by people and people are inherently flawed.”
― Roxane Gay, Bad Feminist: Essays

“Just because you survive something does not mean you are strong.”
― Roxane Gay, Bad Feminist: Essays

“No matter what issues I have with feminism, I am a feminist. I cannot and will not deny the importance and absolute necessity of feminism. Like most people, I’m full of contradictions, but I also don’t want to be treated like shit for being a woman.”
― Roxane Gay, Bad Feminist: Essays

“I approach most things in life with a dangerous level of confidence to balance my generally low self-esteem.”
― Roxane Gay, Bad Feminist

“Perhaps, then, unlikable characters, the ones who are the most human, are also the ones who are the most alive. Perhaps this intimacy makes us uncomfortable because we don't dare be so alive.”
― Roxane Gay, Bad Feminist

“I openly embrace the label of bad feminist. I do so because I am flawed and human. I am not terribly well versed in feminist history. I am not as well read in key feminist texts as I would like to be. I have certain . . . interests and personality traits and opinions that may not fall in line with mainstream feminism, but I am still a feminist. I cannot tell you how freeing it has been to accept this about myself.”
― Roxane Gay, Bad Feminist: Essays

“Maybe I’m a bad feminist, but I am deeply committed to the issues important to the feminist movement. I have strong opinions about misogyny, institutional sexism that consistently places women at a disadvantage, the inequity in pay, the cult of beauty and thinness, the repeated attacks on reproductive freedom, violence against women, and on and on. I am as committed to fighting fiercely for equality as I am committed to disrupting the notion that there is an essential feminism.”
― Roxane Gay, Bad Feminist: Essays

“Happiness [is] only real when shared”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild

“I now walk into the wild.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild

“I read somewhere... how important it is in life not necessarily to be strong, but to feel strong... to measure yourself at least once.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild

“So many people live within unhappy circumstances and yet will not take the initiative to change their situation because they are conditioned to a life of security, conformity, and conservatism, all of which may appear to give one peace of mind, but in reality nothing is more dangerous to the adventurous spirit within a man than a secure future. The very basic core of a man’s living spirit is his passion for adventure. The joy of life comes from our encounters with new experiences, and hence there is no greater joy than to have an endlessly changing horizon, for each day to have a new and different sun.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild

“I'm going to paraphrase Thoreau here... rather than love, than money, than faith, than fame, than fairness... give me truth. ”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild

“Mr. Franz, I think careers are a 20th century invention and I don't want one.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild

“It is easy, when you are young, to believe that what you desire is no less than what you deserve, to assume that if you want something badly enough, it is your God-given right to have it.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild

“Sometimes he tried too hard to make sense of the world, to figure out why people were bad to each other so often.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild

“I don’t want to know what time it is. I don’t want to know what day it is or where I am. None of that matters.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild

“I thought climbing the Devil's Thumb would fix all that was wrong with my life. In the end, of course, it changed almost nothing. But I came to appreciate that mountains make poor receptacles for dreams.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild

“Mr. Franz, I think careers are a 20th Century invention and I don't want one. You don’t need to worry about me; I have a college education. I’m not destitute. I'm living like this by choice.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild

“But [Everett] and McCandless, at least they tried to follow their dream. That’s what was great about them. They tried. Not many do.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild

“When you are in the middle of a story it isn't a story at all, but only a confusion; a dark roaring, a blindness, a wreckage of shattered glass and splintered wood; like a house in a whirlwind, or else a boat crushed by the icebergs or swept over the rapids, and all aboard powerless to stop it. It's only afterwards that it becomes anything like a story at all. When you are telling it, to yourself or to someone else.”
― Margaret Atwood, Alias Grace

“For if the world treats you well, Sir, you come to believe you are deserving of it.”
― Margaret Atwood, Alias Grace

“Murderess is a strong word to have attached to you. It has a smell to it, that word - musky and oppressive, like dead flowers in a vase. Sometimes at night I whisper it over to myself: Murderess, Murderess. It rustles, like a taffeta skirt across the floor.”
― Margaret Atwood, Alias Grace

“I am afraid of falling into hopeless despair, over my wasted life, and I am still not sure how it happened.”
― Margaret Atwood, Alias Grace

“While he writes, I feel as if he is drawing me; or not drawing me, drawing on me - drawing on my skin - not with the pencil he is using, but with an old-fashioned goose pen, and not with the quill end but with the feather end. As if hundreds of butterflies have settled all over my face, and are softly opening and closing their wings.”
― Margaret Atwood, Alias Grace

“While he writes, I feel as if he is drawing me; or not drawing me, drawing on me--drawing on my skin--not with the pencil he is using, but with an old-fashioned goose pen, and not with the quill end but with the feather end. As if hundreds of butterflies have settled all over my face, and are softly opening and closing their wings.

But underneath that is another feeling, a feeling of being wide-eyed awake and watchful. It's like being wakened suddenly in the middle of the night, by a hand over your face, and you sit up with your heart going fast, and no one is there. And underneath that is another feeling still, a feeling like being torn open; not like a body of flesh, it is not painful as such, but like a peach; and not even torn open, but ripe and splitting open of its own accord.

And inside the peach there's a stone.”
― Margaret Atwood, Alias Grace