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“To be born at all is to be situated in a network of relations with other people, and furthermore to find oneself forcibly inserted into linguistic categories that might seem natural and inevitable but are socially constructed and rigorously policed.”
― Olivia Laing, Everybody: A Book about Freedom

“Dad’s out and Chico’s in, I’m like, fuck this. And she’s like watch your mouth and show adults respect. I pay the rent here. So I start staying out with my friends and skipping school just ’cause I feel like it and my teachers say, oh yeah, well here’s to your grades plummeting, and then I’m like, so what, and then they say one more semester and it’s over, you’re so out of here, and I’m like shit, no, they’ll send me to school with remedial kids. My little brother Peanut is gloating cause he’s at Bronx Science and thinks he’s the next Steve Jobs. That’s when I hit the books and school again. I cannot, will not, be showed up by Peanut. And that’s when I see the poster about the playwriting contest and Professor Bass, who is too old to be teaching high school but the damn union can’t fire him, says, you could probably write something decent if you weren’t so arrogant. He says half the students in the school don’t deserve to be here. And I roll my eyes and say well what, if you were”
― Regina Porter, The Travelers

“What does freedom mean? Who is it for? What role does the state play in its preservation or curtailment? Can it be achieved by asserting the rights of the body, or, as the painter Agnes Martin believed, by denying the body altogether?”
― Olivia Laing, Everybody: A Book about Freedom

“I will not sugarcoat the ugliness. People are dead who should be alive. People die every fucking day. And I know where the poison lives.”
― Regina Porter, The Travelers