Varian

“I do not get to savor the masculine cut of my clothes, or the illusion of short hair, or the feeting joy of my skin feeling like mine. Instead, I have to worry if my boyhood is convincing enough to keep me safe.

There is no joy in that. Only fear.”
― Andrew Joseph White, The Spirit Bares Its Teeth

“Why would you want to be one of them?" she says. ”How could you live with yourself?"
I've asked myself that so many times. How could I ever want to be a part of the section of humanity responsible for so much of my suffering? In what ways haven't men hurt me? But then again—in what ways haven't women? In what ways hasn't everyone?
I say, "I don't believe in original sin." Mary looks at me askance, frowning. “What they've done isn't my burden to bear. It's theirs.”
― Andrew Joseph White, The Spirit Bares Its Teeth

“I've been mad at the world for a long time. It’s hard not to be mad at the world when you're eleven years old and everyone you know is suffering, when your mother cries herself to sleep and you can recognize your father's hospital room by the smell of his blood. But the summer before my sophomore year, I learned my great-great-grandfather was a socialist, and suddenly I had the words for why I wanted to bum it all down. Because none of this is real. It's real but it ain't real, it ain't real the way mountains or the rings inside a tree are real. You can't open a book on the laws of physics and find a chapter labeled "Exploiting Workers for Profit and Killing Them When They Ask You to Stop." It's fake! Someone made it up! Workers are exploited, rent is astro-nomical, the cost of healthcare is life-destroying not because they are the path a river carves through a canyon, but because some capitalist fuckers decided they wanted it this way.”
― Andrew Joseph White, Compound Fracture

“I want to lay out my dissected body next to his and show him the pieces of us that are the same. Could he tell his arteries from mine, the folds of my brain from his own? If I excised both our eyes and laid them out on a microscope, would there be a difference?”
― Andrew Joseph White, The Spirit Bares Its Teeth