Isabel J

“It is indeed strange that we find it so difficult to welcome...the blissful nature of the loss of the power of selfhood—a power it was, in any case, always an illusion to think we possessed.”
― Leo Bersani, Intimacies

“It took me a long time to understand that she wasn't being incoherent or contradictory, but rather that it was I myself, arrogant class renegade that I was, who tried to force her discourse into a foreign kind of coherence, one more compatible with my values—that incoherence appears to exist only when you fail to reconstruct the logic that lies behind any given discourse or practice. I came to understand that many different forms of discourse intersected in my mother and spoke through her, that she was constantly torn between her shame at not having finished school and her pride that even so, as she would say, she'd 'made it through and had a bunch of beautiful kids,' and that these two modes of discourse existed only in relation to each other.”
― Édouard Louis, En finir avec Eddy Bellegueule

“Who, we might ask, can afford to dream of a right body? Who believes that such a body exists?”
― Judith Halberstam, Female Masculinity

“I'm only 16," she said, "and I don't know much about the world, but I do know one thing for sure. If I'm pessimistic, then the adults in this world who are not pessimistic are a bunch of idiots.”
― Haruki Murakami