lola

“Male fantasies, male fantasies, is everything run by male fantasies? Up on a pedestal or down on your knees, it's all a male fantasy: that you're strong enough to take what they dish out, or else too weak to do anything about it. Even pretending you aren't catering to male fantasies is a male fantasy: pretending you're unseen, pretending you have a life of your own, that you can wash your feet and comb your hair unconscious of the ever-present watcher peering through the keyhole, peering through the keyhole in your own head, if nowhere else. You are a woman with a man inside watching a woman. You are your own voyeur.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Robber Bride

“Thus to get the princess, to live
with her joyfully and happily day in and day out (for it is also conceivable that
the knight of resignation might get the princess, but that his soul had discerned the
impossibility of their future happiness), thus to live joyfully and happily every
instant by virtue of the absurd, every instant to see the sword hanging over the
head of the beloved, and yet to find repose in the pain of resignation, but joy by
virtue of the absurd—this is marvellous.”
― Soren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling

“The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist; a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain.”
― Ursula K. LeGuin, The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas

“I cannot remember the books I've read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson