Amy

“I believe that all organizing is science fiction - that we are shaping the future we long for and have not yet experienced.”
― Adrienne Maree Brown, Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good

“Was it not the case, said Aris – the boy who the previous day had mentioned the putrefying dog – that we use animals as pure reflections of human consciousness, while at the same time their existence exerts a sort of moral force by which human beings feel objectified and therefore safely contained? Like slaves, he said, or servants, in whose absence their masters would feel vulnerable. They watch us living; they prove that we are real; through them, we access the story of ourselves. In our interactions with them we – not they – are shown to be what we are. Surely – for human beings – the most important thing about an animal, he said, is that it can’t speak. His own story concerned a hamster he had when he was small. He used to watch it run in its cage. It had a wheel it ran around. It was always running – the wheel whirred and whirred. Yet it never went anywhere. He loved his hamster. He understood that if he loved it he had to set it free. The hamster ran away, and he never saw it again.”
― Rachel Cusk, Outline

“Although sex was something they both regarded as perilous, marriage had, by contrast, seemed safe—a safe house in a world of danger; the ultimate haven of two solitary, fearful souls. When you were single, this was what everyone who was already married was always telling you. Daniel himself had said it to his unmarried friends. It was, however, a lie. Sex had everything to do with violence, that was true, and marriage was at once a container for the madness between men and women and a fragile hedge against it, as religion was to death, and the laws of physics to the immense quantity of utter emptiness of which the universe was made. But there was nothing at all safe about marriage. It was a doubtful enterprise, a voyage in an untested craft, across a hostile ocean, with a map that was a forgery and with no particular destination but the grave.”
― Michael Chabon, Werewolves in Their Youth

“Midwives’ experience of fathers is incidental but proficient, like a farmer’s knowledge of bird migration or the behavior of clouds.”
― Michael Chabon, Werewolves in Their Youth