Raina Killingsworth

“Sooner or later, almost every discussion about the way people behave toward one another ends up becoming an argument about “human nature.” That’s never been an easy thing for biology teachers to explain: on the one hand, our entire species survived because we stuck together and cooperated, but on the other hand we developed because the strongest individuals always thrived at the expense of the weak. So we always end up arguing about where the boundaries should be drawn. How selfish are we allowed to be? How much are we obliged to care about each other?”
― Fredrik Backman, Beartown

“My survival depends on my ability to speak truth to power, not just for myself, but for us. I’m committed to getting ours. It requires me to relay how I struggled with living, dreaming, loving, fucking, being seen, and simply being in my body, in this world. This is a universal experience.”
― Janet Mock, Surpassing Certainty: What My Twenties Taught Me

“Sometimes she thinks to their time in Canada and what all the hockey coaches there kept banging on about: they wanted “the right kind of guy” for their team. Not just someone who could play, but someone who fit into the locker room, who didn’t cause problems, who did his job. Someone who played hard and kept quiet. She wonders what it would take for a woman to be the right kind of guy.”
― Fredrik Backman, Beartown

“But what can be said about a man who keeps his needs and his obsessions largely to himself? When a man expresses what he’s afraid of, his fears and longings undergo revision in the telling and retelling—friends and family have their own ways of altering the material—and soon the so-called fears and longings become almost comfortable with overuse.”
― John Irving, A Son of the Circus