Bharati Challa

“But they were all good stories, and that’s what mattered. It was the raison d’être of my early twenties. I was a six-foot human metal detector for fragments of potential anecdotes, crawling along the earth of existence, my nose pressed to the grass in hopes of finding something to dig at.”
― Dolly Alderton, Everything I Know About Love

“Welfare bureaucracies claim a professional, political, and financial monopoly over the social imagination, setting standards of what is valuable and what is feasible.

This monopoly is at the root of the modernization of poverty. Every simple need to which an institutional answer is found permits the invention of a new class of poor and a new definition of poverty. Ten years ago in Mexico it was the normal thing to be born and to die in one's own home and to be buried by one's friends. Only the soul's needs were taken care of by the institutional church. Now to begin and end life at home become signs either of poverty or of special privilege. Dying and death have come under
the institutional management of doctors and undertakers.

Once basic needs have been translated by a society into demands for scientifically produced commodities, poverty
is defined by standards which the technocrats can change at will. Poverty then refers to those who have fallen behind an advertised ideal of consumption in some important respect.”
― Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society

“What you call 'forms' of intelligence are only degrees.”
― Françoise Sagan

“You are preserving your dignity by refusing to show your feelings. But there are moments when love ought to be undignified, extravagant, even violent.”
― Iris Murdoch, A Fairly Honourable Defeat