booky stuff !

“If someone asked him why Carl could call him Chief, but a drunken white farm boy couldn’t, Walt couldn’t have explained it. When Carl said it, it was filled with an admiration for the American Indian that he had learned from his German mother and Walt could forgive that. When JohnBoy said it, it was full of the mockery of a man whose family had stolen your land.”
― Shane Hawk, Never Whistle at Night: An Indigenous Dark Fiction Anthology

“When I tasted her brine, I was hit with a feeling of timelessness, as though this had all happened before, somewhere as far back as our ancestors in Russia or Lithuanian or Poland or Moldova. We were two shtetl Jewish women reincarnated, two women who had known each other and been lovers in a past life. I felt that all that had ever happened before was happening right now would happen forever. There was a love that had always existed between women. It would continue to exist. We were propagating that love. It was radiating out my apartment windows, through the city, across the canyons, over the hills, and into the night sky.”
― Melissa Broder, Milk Fed

“What, then, would it mean to imagine a system in which punishment is not allowed to become the source of corporate profit? How can we imagine a society in which race and class are not primary determinants of punishment? Or one in which punishment itself is no longer the central concern in the making of justice? An abolitionist approach that seeks to answer questions such as these would require us to imagine a constellation of alternative strategies and institutions, with the ultimate aim of removing the prison from the social and ideological landscapes of our society. In other words, we would not be looking for prisonlike substitutes for the prison, such as house arrest safeguarded by electronic surveillance bracelets. Rather, positing decarceration as our overarching strategy, we would try to envision a continuum of alternatives to imprisonment—demilitarization of schools, revitalization of education at all levels, a health system that provides free physical and mental care to all, and a justice system based on reparation and reconciliation rather than retribution and vengeance. The creation of new institutions that lay claim to the space now occupied by the prison can eventually start to crowd out the prison so that it would inhabit increasingly smaller areas of our social and psychic landscape. Schools can therefore be seen as the most powerful alternative to jails and prisons. Unless the current structures of violence are eliminated from schools in impoverished communities of color—including the presence of armed security guards and police—and unless schools become places that encourage the joy of learning, these schools will remain the major conduits to prisons. The alternative would be to transform schools into vehicles for decarceration.”
― Angela Y. Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete?

“What about holding hands in a movie theater? Can girls hold hands in a movie theater?”
― Melissa Broder, Milk Fed