Ina > Ina's Quotes

“Never underestimate the power of fiction to tell the truth.”
― Leslie Feinberg, Stone Butch Blues

“Life is too short and love is too long.”
― Tamsyn Muir, Nona the Ninth

“The question feels so patronizing: as if I’ve never thought about gender and how I choose to present myself, how I dress, how I stand, how I crop my hair short, and what this means. As if I’ve never thought about what it would be like to live as a man instead, the relief that would come from passing, with not having to face the everyday violence and humiliations of living in my body. As if I’ve never thought about how I don’t want that, how every cell in my body recoils at that thought of being a man, and yet how harrowing it is that the only way I can get out of my bed and make it through the day is by wearing masculinity on my body. As if I’ve never held dear my feminist rage, never thought about how I feel so politically aligned with womanhood and yet hate inhabiting it, hate it when my body is read as such. As if the only way to be trans is to transition to a binary gender, as if I can’t exist as I have been, in some space in between or beyond, using she or they pronouns and seething when people call me a woman and laughing when people tell me I should transition.”
― Lamya H., Hijab Butch Blues

“That's the beauty of learning a new language. It should feel like an enormous undertaking. It ought to intimidate you. It makes you appreciate the complexity of the ones you know already.”
― R.F. Kuang, Babel

“Es gibt Reichtümer, an denen man zugrunde geht, wenn man sie nicht mit anderen teilen kann.”
― Michael Ende, Momo

“I am tired of trying to hold things together that cannot be held. Trying to control what cannot be controlled. I am tired of denying myself what I want for fear of breaking things I cannot fix. They will break no matter what we do.”
― Erin Morgenstern, The Night Circus

“I wondered how it would feel to be touched and not be afraid.”
― Leslie Feinberg, Stone Butch Blues

“It is always interesting to see how often women are described as ravenous when it is the men who, without exception, take without thought of compensation.”
― Cassandra Khaw, The Salt Grows Heavy

“Il n'est pas de destin qui ne se surmonte par le mépris”
― Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays

“That's just what translation is, I think. That's all speaking is. Listening to the other and trying to see past your own biases to glimpse what they're trying to say. Showing yourself to the world, and hoping someone else understands.”
― R.F. Kuang, Babel

“Books are letters in bottles, cast into the waves of time, from one person trying to save the world to another.”
― Amal El-Mohtar, This Is How You Lose the Time War

“Perhaps even people you like and admire immensely can make you see the World in ways you would rather not.”
― Susanna Clarke, Piranesi

“There were men who cracked their knuckles while divulging to me what they would do to the defendant if they got the chance, thinking this was somehow reassuring for me to hear. But all it did was make me realize that there wasn't so big a difference between the man who brutalized Denise and half the men I passed every day on the street.”
― Jessica Knoll, Bright Young Women