Sophie

“The taste of coffee hangs on my lips like lipstick. I made it my mission, in this summer, in this heat, to learn to like the taste of coffee. I want to be woman. No, alien. Preferably beautiful. Just beautiful. That's all I want. Utterly forsaken. Utterly otherwordly. It's easier to be bold when you're beautiful.”
― Hazel Evans

“worst things about London - the fact that it costs money even to sit down. In Paris, if you had no money and could not find a public bench, you would sit on the pavement. Heaven knows what sitting on the pavement would lead to in London - prison probably.”
― George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London

“For women have sat indoors all these millions of years, so that by this time the very walls are permeated by their creative force, which has, so overcharged the capacity of bricks and mortar that it must needs harness itself to pens and brushes and business and politics. But this creative power differs greatly from the creative power of men. And one must conclude that it would be a thousand pities if it were hindered or wasted, for it was won by centuries of the most drastic discipline, and there is nothing to take its place.”
― Virginia Woolf

“Attention, as well as being a commodity that can be monetised through digital platforms, is a psychological wage. We know this from when we are children: think of the heaven of basking in the glow of an attentive parent or
teacher. To be recognised is to be told that you matter, that your life has worth and that you have a place in the world. There’s nothing unhealthy about that. But our media and politics leverage the psychological wages of attention in a way that is utterly corrosive and warping.”
― Ash Sarkar, Minority Rule: Adventures in the Culture War