Nicole

“The unendurable is the beginning of the curve of joy.”
― Djuna Barnes, Nightwood

“Cameron found that when people use female as a noun, as opposed to woman, it’s often in explicitly negative contexts. For example: My poor Clemence was as helpless a female as you’d find in a long day’s march. “Stupid, crazy female” was all he said as he set about bandaging it. A call yesterday involved giving the chatty female at the other end one’s address. These examples all involve a speaker passing derogatory judgment on the subject. And though their statements would still be insulting if you swapped in the word woman, they would be, as Cameron says, “less unequivocally contemptuous.” The corpus data also showed that the noun form of female is almost never used in a positive context. You wouldn’t hear someone say, “My best friend is the kindest, most generous female I have ever met.”
― Amanda Montell, Wordslut: A Feminist Guide to Taking Back the English Language

“There is nothing new under the sun, but there are new suns.”
― Octavia E. Butler

“Two possibilities exist: either we are alone in the Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying.”
― Arthur C. Clarke