Caitlin Owen Bates
https://www.goodreads.com/emmacaitlin
“Girls are the only ones who can really give each other close attention, the kind we equate with being loved. They noticed what we want noticed.”
― The Girls
― The Girls
“So much of desire, at that age, was a willful act. Trying so hard to slur the rough, disappointing edges of boys into the shape of someone we could love. We spoke of our desperate need for them with rote and familiar words, like we were reading lines from a play. Later I would see this: how impersonal and grasping our love was, pinging around the universe, hoping for a host to give form to our wishes.”
― The Girls
― The Girls
“What does it feel like to be lonely? It feels like being hungry: like being hungry when everyone around you is readying for a feast. It feels shameful and alarming, and over time these feelings radiate outwards, making the lonely person increasingly isolated, increasingly estranged. It hurts, in the way that feelings do, and it also has physical consequences that take place invisibly, inside the closed compartments of the body. It advances, is what I’m trying to say, cold as ice and clear as glass, enclosing and engulfing.”
― The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone
― The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone
“When the phrase 'white feminism', used as a derogatory term, picked up circulation in the feminist lexicon, its popularity made some feminists who are white somewhat agitated. But this knee-jerk backlash against the phrase - to what is more often than not a rigorous critique of the consequences of structural racism - was undoubtedly born from an entitled need to defend whiteness rather than any yearning to reflect on the meaning of the phrase 'white feminism'. What does it mean for your feminist politics to be strangled, stoppered, and hindered by whiteness?”
― Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People About Race
― Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People About Race
“Because it is my name! Because I cannot have another in my life! Because I lie and sign myself to lies! Because I am not worth the dust on the feet of them that hang! How may I live without my name? I have given you my soul; leave me my name!”
― The Crucible
― The Crucible
Caitlin’s 2025 Year in Books
Take a look at Caitlin’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
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