ReadBecca

“a body is skin wrapped around stories, is tissue filled with veins that the truth runs through, is a box of bones with a voice inside. i don’t want to be a volcano. i want to be a garden full of flowers bursting open toward life, all of them singing, i’m here. i mean something. i want to live.”
― Kai Cheng Thom, Falling Back in Love with Being Human: Letters to Lost Souls

“Our clothing becomes a part of our bodies, both reflecting and shaping our personalities and helping us fit into various social roles—or making it hard for us to do so. An obvious example of this is women’s clothing in the mid-1800s, which consisted of large full skirts, frills, and boned corsets. These outfits not only sent the message that women were decorative objects, valuable mainly for their beauty; they also made it impossible for women to move around easily or quickly and harder for them to perform many types of physical tasks, which in turn served as a visual “evidence” that women were less competent than men. Most women internalized the dress codes of the time and only felt comfortable in such clothing. This in turn led some to think of themselves as helpless and fundamentally decorative: their clothing determined their social roles and ultimately their sense of self.”
― Richard Thompson Ford, Dress Codes: How the Laws of Fashion Made History

“i want to dream of a world where instead of building prisons, we build healing temples. i want to sing the stories that tell not of the cleansing power of blood, but the transformative power of tears. somewhere out in the vast universe, there must be a place where the exiled gather in humility and honesty to tend to the wounds in our souls and the wounds in the world. a place beyond punishment or even redemption. a place where all things can be seen and held for what they are. and in this life or the next, someday i’ll meet you there.”
― Kai Cheng Thom, Falling Back in Love with Being Human: Letters to Lost Souls

“He didn't know how to explain. Even worse, he didn't know what he'd be explaining. Golems were... golems. Big lumps of clay with the spark of life in them. Clothes? What for? Even the male golems in the Post Office just had a lick of blue and gold paint to make them look smart - hold on, he was getting it now! There were no male golems! Golems were golems, and had been happy to be just golems for thousands of years. And now they were in modern Ankh-Morpork, where all kinds of races and people and ideas were shaken up and it was amazing what dripped out of the bottle.”
― Terry Pratchett, Making Money