Tanya Gupta

“In any culture the dispossessed and powerless willl turn to religion and legend, because what else do they have to believe in? They need these stories of heroism and superhuman saviors to give them hope.”
― Wafaa Bilal, Shoot an Iraqi: Art, Life and Resistance Under the Gun

“Doctors know nothing. Well. That's kind of unfair. Let's just say the world is unpredictable. Science is unreliable. It can't tell you who you are or what you'll want or how you'll feel. All these researchers are going crazy in their labs, trying to fit us into these little boxes so they can justify their jobs, or their government funding, or their life's work. They can theorize and they can give you a mean, median and mode but it's all standardized guesswork, made official by arrogance. You have to be pretty into yourself to think you can play a part in defining the identity of a bunch of people you don't know, of human beings with complicated shit going on in their bodies. They still don't know what certain parts of our brains do, they still don't know how to cure a common cold, and they say they know about sexuality, about gender. Well, you're not a man because you like football and you're not a woman because you're attracted to men and you're not a chick because you like to be the one who gives and you're not a dude because you like to receive or because sometimes you cry at dumb movies.”
― Abigail Tarttelin, Golden Boy

“A young artist's career is a matter of claiming a place for oneself, of saying, "I am here." Having gone through that phase, a more mature artist can concentrate on truly developing talent and vision.”
― Wafaa Bilal, Shoot an Iraqi: Art, Life and Resistance Under the Gun

“It's HE-RO," the boy argued.
"No," the girl insisted,
"it's HER-O.”
― Joseph Gordon-Levitt, The Tiny Book of Tiny Stories, Vol. 1