Manoj Kumar

“I feel naked in my Tommy hoodie and Victoria's Secret sweatpants with PINK written across the ass. The sweatpants aren't pink though - they're gray. This always confuses me when I put them on, because shouldn't they say GRAY - on the backside? Maybe Victoria's secret is she's colorblind.”
― Fanny Merkin, Fifty Shames of Earl Grey

“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

“Sometimes I still feel that there are two of me: one clean, flawless picture, the other imperfect and cracked; one boy, one girl; one voice that speaks aloud and one that whispers in my ear; one publicly known to have been troubled but be on the mend, the other who has privately lost something to do with innocence and gained something to do with knowledge and adulthood that can never be undone. I feel sometimes there are things that tear me in two directions, that there are two sets of thoughts that grow side by side. But then I realize that I am whole, whatever that means and does not mean; I am complete without the need for additions or alteration.”
― Abigail Tarttelin, Golden Boy

“Down to their innate molecular core, cancer cells are hyperactive, survival-endowed, scrappy, fecund, inventive copies of ourselves.”
― Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer