Margaret

“No matter the problem, no matter the actions of an aggressor, the fault is mine. Regardless of the politics or life experience of the person I am talking to, the answer comes like clockwork. I guess if you hate it that much, you should just lose weight. But despite its ubiquity in conversations about fatness and fat people, that is the logic of abuse. You made me do this. I wouldn’t hurt you if you didn’t make me. Just because we are accustomed to hearing it doesn’t make it healthy, productive, humane, or helpful. Its functions are threefold: One, to absolve us of any responsibility to address a widespread social problem. Two, to free us from having to re-examine our own beliefs and biases. And three, to silence and isolate fat people, to show us that any complaint we lodge and any issue we raise will be for naught, and may even cost us relationships, respect, comfort, and safety.”
― Aubrey Gordon, What We Don't Talk About When We Talk About Fat

“Lock her up”—as a prong of Make America Great Again—became a promise to weaponize the machinery of law to silence, threaten, and isolate women. In the end it didn’t even matter whom the pronoun “her” referenced. For crowds who embraced it, it was a generalized promise that after centuries of women’s diligent efforts at bending and shaping and coaxing the law into affording them equal protection and dignity, their gender itself could become a crime.”
― Dahlia Lithwick, Lady Justice: Women, the Law, and the Battle to Save America

“Where do you light the fire?” Tarana Burke asks. “Your sphere of influence is a perfect place to start and end. . . . And if that is where you are a revolution for the rest of your life, that’s okay. What this moment in time tries to tell us is that your work is not real, your efforts aren’t big enough—if it’s not the Me Too movement, if it’s not Black Lives Matter, if it’s not that, then you haven’t done your job, you haven’t done enough. But I think that people need to understand just how important it is for people to see you want to be a revolution, for you to understand the people who you are influencing right around you. And that’s enough.”
― Ijeoma Oluo, Be a Revolution: How Everyday People Are Fighting Oppression and Changing the World—and How You Can, Too

“Temperance is the place where magic meets the mundane, Wilhelmina. Remembering the mundane makes us smart; remembering the magic makes us brave.”
― Kristin Cashore, There Is a Door in This Darkness