Polly

“No more Guernicas, no more Auschwitzes, no more Hiroshimas, no more Setifs. Hooray! But what about the impossibility of living, what about this stifling mediocrity and this absence of passion? What about the jealous fury in which the rankling of never being ourselves drives us to imagine that other people are happy? What about this feeling of never really being inside your own skin?”
― Raoul Vaneigem, The Revolution of Everyday Life

“Because this ideal of the attractive but not whorish white woman, in a good marriage but not self-effacing, with a nice job but not so successful she outshines her man, slim but not neurotic over food, forever young without being disfigured by the surgeon’s knife, a radiant mother not overwhelmed by nappies and homework, who manages her home beautifully without becoming a slave to housework, who knows a thing or two but less than a man, this happy white woman who is constantly shoved under our noses, this woman we are all supposed to work hard to resemble – never mind that she seems to be running herself ragged for not much reward – I for one have never met her, not anywhere. My hunch is that she doesn’t exist.”
― Virginie Despentes, King Kong Theory

“In addition to being a life-sustaining and sanity-maintaining way of managing inner states, cutting is a primitive yet powerful form of communication for people unable to adequately verbalize their feelings. Self-mutilation provides concrete expression for the pain they feel inside—a language written on the body, through blood, wounds, and scars.”
― Marilee Strong, A Bright Red Scream: Self-Mutilation and the Language of Pain

“Standing there on the embankment, staring into the current, I realized that—in spite of all the risks involved—a thing in motion will always be better than a thing at rest; that change will always be a nobler thing than permanence; that that which is static will degenerate and decay, turn to ash, while that which is in motion is able to last for all eternity.”
― Olga Tokarczuk, Flights